Introduction

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Twenty-year-old Elif departed Istanbul for West Berlin on 10 November 1964.1 A photo snapped moments before departure shows her as a smiling woman hanging on to an exterior train step, lock armed with the young man standing next to her.² Just behind her, two more smiling young women peer out from the interior of the train through an open window. In the picture, Elif is a petite brunette, sporting a trendy bob hairstyle with bangs and wearing a knee-length plaid skirt with flats. Her excitement is palpable. Before departure, Elif had worked as a seamstress in a Greek Cypriot’s Istanbul shop. Elif’s life changed, however, when a civil war between Greek and Turkish Cypriots raged on the eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus from 1963 to 1964. The hostilities were brutal. During the “Bloody Christmas” of 1963, 109 Turkish Cypriot villages were damaged, making some 25,000 Turkish Cypriots refugees, and, most viciously, a Turkish Cypriot officer’s family, including the young children, was found violently murdered in their bathtub.³ Not surprisingly, the conflict carried over to Istanbul, where tensions between ethnic Greeks and Turks had long simmered. Elif’s boss was just one of many harassed in 1964. Feeling threatened, he closed his shop and departed Istanbul, leaving Elif unemployed and unsure of her future. Indirectly, the civil war in Cyprus prompted her to make a choice that was popular at the time – she moved to West Berlin with a contract as a Gastarbeiter, or “guest worker,” just one of many who would forever change the course of German history, culture, and society.

Elif departed for Berlin from the Vinegar Seller’s Station in Istanbul. The station is famous not only as the last stop on the illustrious Orient Express but also as a point of departure for thousands of guest workers leaving Turkey for Western Europe, travelling the route in reverse of the direction suggested by the well-known name, from the “Orient” to Europe. It is adjacent to a bustling market area on the edge of the Golden Horn with a panoramic view of the Bosporus Strait – the geographic boundary between Europe and Asia. This oft-photographed vista includes gorgeous views of sixteenth-century imperial mosques, the old town that was once the heart of Byzantium – the Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Empire – and the 1348 Genoese Galata Tower, known in Latin as the “Tower of Christ.” Elif was caught up in her city’s and people’s histories. Though her people’s eight thousand-year history constrained her in some ways, I argue she was also a protagonist and shaper of future conditions. These juxtapositions of East and West, Christian and Muslim, and new and old set the stage for Elif’s new adventure, one in which she would become a central actor in new and timeless debates, but in a novel context: Cold War Europe.

In 2003, Elif and I met in Berlin’s Kreuzberg Museum. Through open windows, the clamour of cars pumping bass beats; children playing and shouting “anne!” or “mom” in Turkish; and aggressive bicycle bells provided the background noise. We sat among an exhibition on Turkish guest worker migration to Berlin’s Kreuzberg neighbourhood, the westernmost sector of West Berlin that abutted the Berlin Wall and is known as “Little Istanbul.” Elif is nothing like the picture of a typical ethnic Turkish woman in Berlin: she has short, uncovered hair and a sleeveless sweater; she once spoke Greek in addition to Turkish and German; and she is independent, divorced, and owns her own business. Her smile and hearty laugh preceded almost everything she said. She admitted that, at just twenty years old, she had been a bit naive when she arrived in West Germany. “It was an adventure,” Elif told me. She recounted thinking, “If I make it, it is OK, and if I don’t, that is OK, too. I was single; no one was expecting me. I had no children. I was not yet married. I was very, very self-confident and often very independent. I had no limitations – not from my extended family or from my parents.”4 In an archived interview from 1995, Elif started with a brazen, almost defensive comment: “I want first to emphasize that I have no regrets. I made the right decision.”⁵ Likewise, when we met, she began by stating that she was most often asked not just why she had come but why she had stayed in West Germany. A Japanese journalist had recently asked her why she stayed past her contract period of one year. “Why should I leave? I like it here,” she apparently replied. Her frustration ran deep.

Elif, like thousands of others, did not overstay her contract; West German employers extended it. And yet journalists have not sought out former employers to ask them the same questions. Elif is representative of the crossroads between Turkey and post-war Germany but not necessarily of the standard images, reports, and histories of the guest worker program of the last fifty years – stories that have reported on honour killings, failed multiculturalism, headscarf debates, and continuities with Germany’s dark past. Elif and many of the other people who agreed to be interviewed were eager to share and recast their personal histories, and these stories of success and adventure are significant because they complicate narratives of solely miserable, confused, and exploited guest workers.6 This book emphasizes individuals, interactions, and everyday experiences in order to contribute to the growing scholarship on guest worker social and cultural experience in order to help rethink less complex political narratives.⁷ Inherent in merging sources ranging from government files to film to oral history is a shift in perspective. It is important to recognize individual actors, including the limits of their agency, and to nuance ideas of post-war Europe, divided Berlin, labour migration, and intercultural integration.

Guest Workers in the Long Post-war

Despite her arrival in the mid-1960s, long after the rubble had been cleared, Elif believed she lived in “post-war” West Germany. She noted that her German colleagues were of the generation who had been young women and girls during the war and its aftermath. “They were Trümmerfrauen [or “rubble women”],” Elif noted. “They cleaned all those bricks … They barely slept and had no roof over their heads. They were eyewitnesses to so much,” she said before trailing off.⁸ She looked back fondly on these colleagues who had helped her at work, taught her German, and stayed in touch with her for years after their retirement. Women who had borne witness to the Nazi state and its aftermath were now colleagues and friends with a foreign guest worker, someone who represented another aspect of their post-war constellation.

Elif arrived in a divided Berlin that was still mired in post-war reconstruction. Indeed, when guest workers arrived in the late 1950s through the early 1970s, Germany was still suffering from extreme housing shortages due to extensive aerial bombing and in-street fighting during the war and was still debating political and social “normalcy.”⁹ Earlier descriptions of the “zero hour” – the moment after the Second World War when Germany started from scratch to rebuild not just its buildings and economy but also society, families, culture, and nationalism – included transient populations and displaced persons.10 However, the complexities and experiences of guest workers, the first arriving in 1955, have largely remained a separate narrative, disconnected from this pivotal era in German history. Foreign workers also played complex roles in the “long post-war.”¹¹ Historian Tony Judt sees the Cold War itself as an aspect of the post-war, making the case that the Second World War had an “epilogue that lasted another half century.”¹² Within this recent turn towards the long post-war – one that see the effects of the war impacting all aspects of society for decades – foregrounding immigration and demographic shifts can help measure the success of opposing post-war ideals.

Within the context of the long post-war, the guest worker program was, in fact, central to the split between East and West as Cold War alliances developed and as the Western industrial and capitalist model of production influenced West Germany’s new national identity. The building of the Berlin Wall, a Cold War manoeuvre, spurred the expansion of the guest worker program. Furthermore, Western European countries continuously relied on extra-European labour to shore up their industry against the Eastern Bloc. Ideas of “East” and of “Asia” continuously changed throughout the twentieth century, in part because of the Cold War. However, guest workers also defied Cold War boundaries. Some who were considered non-European came from former Western European colonies in Africa, NATO ally Turkey sent its workers through the Eastern Bloc en route to West Germany, and, likewise, Yugoslavian guest workers crossed from east to west of the Iron Curtain. After 1989, some of former “Soviet Central Asia” became prospectively “European.” Alliances and migrations helped construct and challenge Europe’s borders in the post-war era.

It is fitting that Elif worked alongside former “rubble women,” as both sets of women were key rebuilders of post-war Germany in myriad ways. Scholars have noted that after the hypermasculine Nazi state, post-war Germany found itself in the “hour of the woman” due to women’s prominence in the post-war period.¹³ Significantly, focusing on post-war German women’s plights allowed a welcome escape from attention to war crimes.¹⁴ However the rubble women were not alone in rebuilding West Germany. Elif was just one of many guest workers and migrants, female and male, who not only bolstered West German industry but also set it on a new and irrevocable path. Guest workers played a key role in West German internal discussions, ranging from rebuilding to Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or “dealing with the past,” and from gender to family discourse.

While most of West Germany, especially industry, had recovered by the 1960s, it was the gendered full employment achieved through the guest worker programs that led to the sense that West Germany was indeed “rebuilt,” including socially.15 For many, increased female employment, especially among middle- and upper-class women, was a symptom of war, and therefore women “returning to the home” should have been a result of peace. Historians have noted that post-war rebuilding did not include a progressive vision of working women.¹⁶ Instead, government policies, such as family allowances for children, protective legislation for female workers, and family law, drafted the idealized image of the male-breadwinner nuclear family. (At the same time, it is noteworthy that some post-war German women questioned men’s inherent ability to lead.)¹⁷ Historian Mark Spicka has shown that political campaigns from the late 1940s and early 1950s demonstrated that the Hour of the Woman was short-lived: “[the] conservatism toward gender roles [in the 1950s] suggested that although the Trümmerfrauen represented the regeneration of the German nation, they did not signal a fundamental change in public expectations for women and men in society.”¹⁸ However, implementing this traditional view heavily depended on the importation of foreign workers, especially women, which allowed many German women to retire from low-skilled jobs to focus on motherhood. Indeed, prior to the guest worker program, demographics dictated that female-headed households until more men could return.¹⁹ The impetus for the nuclear family was then more an ideal than a reality but an important one nonetheless, as it was deemed the sole foundation upon which democracy could flourish. Male-headed families with housewives also provided a stark contrast to the (unrealized) communist family ideal in which gender equity would be achieved, with both parents working, housework shared, and childcare supported by the state.²⁰ The unstated reality here is that guest workers allowed for the re-establishment of German nuclear families, a new national pride in the economy to flourish, and West Germany to achieve its place of prominence in the capitalist, democratic Western Bloc.²¹

This book looks back on the guest worker program’s origins and impetus, initial plans and dreams, and points of first contact and interactions. Here individual microhistories help answer large-scale questions of how the program and its participants’ intentions evolved, with particular focus on the small events that could have gone differently. Some have suggested the guest worker program provides an example of how individual nation states lose their importance relative to supranational trends such as labour migration and Cold War alliances.22 Others have wondered whether guest worker history is centred on identity, unable to escape the influence of the nation, and instead part of cultural exchange, hybridity, and transfer.²³ In all cases, though, post-war Europe is an inescapable context. Mass postcolonial migration from Asia and Africa changed the course and composition of European metropoles, engendering new questions of identity, belonging, historical legacy, and atonement while shattering precarious categories, such as “European.” Stories similar to Elif’s echoed across Western Europe in the 1960s in countries such as France, the Netherlands, and Great Britain. In the German case, it was the “Turks,” an amorphous grouping that stood in for all “foreigners,” who took centre stage.

Fifty years after the signing of the bilateral guest worker treaty between West Germany and the Turkish Republic, there is still little known about the cases that do not fit into the standard narratives – the women like Elif, the German officials who worried about how the guest worker program might be impacting West Germany’s international image, and foreign men who lived in both East and West Berlin. Nascent West Germany could remake itself in the 1950s, build a new nationalism, and atone for its past, claiming to uplift not just the economy but also unskilled foreign workers with its proud traditions of industry and German engineering.²⁴ At the same time, the Turkish Republic could fulfil its own dreams of modernization and Westernization, renewed after the 1916 coup. Extensive planning and consideration went into the guest worker program on both the sending and the receiving sides, not just at the political and philosophical levels but also in the finest details of regulations and requirements. But the guest worker program did not occur just at the state level. It also occurred at the ground level and was defined not by state-issued memos but by daily interactions between rank-and-file officials, employers, dorm managers, and workers, all of whom broke rules, made up their own, and negotiated these ever-evolving relationships.

Employers played a key role in Germany’s post-war reconstruction, especially with its reputation. During the guest worker program, West Germany brought in large numbers of foreign workers, packed into trains no less, on the heels of a recent troubling past. Historians have long grappled with this historical context when considering how West Germany conceived and implemented a post-war program using foreign labour, including selling this program to its own population, to the international community, and to the recruited workers themselves.25 Contemporary West Germans also had the foresight to consider their historical context. Almost ten years after Elif’s arrival in West Berlin, on the other side of West Germany, a representative of Duinger Steinzeugwerk Mühle & Co, an employer of foreign workers, wrote an angry letter to the president of the Bundesanstalt für Arbeit, or German federal employment agency (BA). In his letter, he reported with frustration that guest workers bound for his factory had arrived in the middle of the night, forcing them to wait on the station platform for an additional eighteen hours after a three-day train ride.²⁶ This was not the result of inexperience: the complaint came on 29 July 1973, almost twenty years after the very first arrival of guest workers in Germany. With exasperation, the employer noted: “Surely you will agree with us that such occurrences do not present a good calling card for the Federal Republic of Germany.”²⁷ The employer was not only angry with how poorly workers were being treated but also especially concerned with how this impacted West Germany’s post-war image, or “calling card,” in relation to non-ethnic Germans’ apparent exploitation. He understood and was openly self-conscious of Germany’s historical legacy and of the fierce competition to win workers who could have chosen other Western European countries. Much like this West German employer, the federal employment agency’s officials – particularly those working from the liaison office in Istanbul – not only actively sought, recruited, interviewed, and vetted workers, but did so with great concern and extreme attention to detail. In other words, the letter did not fall on deaf ears even though traces of concern have not made it into the popular historical record.

Historical Drivers and Contemporary Motivations

In German history specifically and European history generally, historical backdrops are inescapably significant. The post-war guest worker agreements came on the heels not just of the Second World War but also of a legacy of exploitative labour migration for several European powers. Taken together, Germany’s history of foreign labour fits neatly into the larger context of Western Europe in general. Analogous to Germany, several Western European powers were importing foreign labour amid a long history of colonial exploitation and violence. Indeed, importing foreign labour was not a novel idea for traditional European powers. Overseas colonization had long provided temporary, and largely powerless, labour stores for European authorities. During the First World War, traditional imperial governments, such as in Britain and France, recruited labour from colonial holdings in places such as North Africa, Indochina, and China, only to deport the majority of workers when the war ended.28 With a similar mindset, Germany had relied on Eastern Europe for its temporary labour dating back to the 1700s. In the twentieth century, the Nazi state was infamous for using various categories of temporary, forced, and slave labour, mostly imported from other countries, on an unprecedented scale. In the Nazi era, forced labourers made up as much as 20 per cent of the German workforce, and few survived the grueling and inhuman conditions.²⁹

After the Second World War, West Germany again relied on foreign labour, this time a steady stream of refugees, displaced persons, and expellees from Eastern Europe. By 1950, West Germany had received 7.9 million ethnic Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the Soviet Union. In the years leading up to the Berlin Wall’s construction in 1961, an additional 3.8 million persons arrived from East Germany.³⁰ Concurrently, while other European countries were abandoning their colonies, West Germany fostered closer relations with European colonial powers, continuing to support Portugal and its colonial policies. West Germany also continued close economic, military, and trade relations with the apartheid government of South Africa even after South Africa was expelled from the British Commonwealth in 1961. Interestingly, it is within this additional historical context, one of continuing support for older colonial systems – systems that had relied on racist exploitation – that Western European nations, including West Germany, became increasingly dependent on cheap imported labour to sustain continued economic growth. By 1960, 20 per cent of Germany’s population was made up of refugees from the Eastern Bloc. However, East Germany’s 1961 construction of the Berlin Wall and accompanying ban on Republikflucht, or “fleeing the Republic,” put a stop to the hundreds of thousands of refugees and expellees flowing into the West via Berlin, who had provided an essential workforce.³¹ From the late 1940s through the early 1970s, Western Europe was the site of multiple population movements, as ethnic Germans, refugees, and displaced persons moved across Europe with numbers rising from 279,000 in 1960 to 1,314,100 in 1966; as decolonization spurred migration from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean to France and Britain; and as foreign labourers migrated from northern Africa and Europe’s periphery to Western Europe.32 Considering this broader historical context, guest worker migration was actually relatively small.³³

Material conditions and economic concerns permeated every aspect of war-ravaged post-war societies and provided another essential backdrop to post-war migrations. Like many of the volatile economies of the period, the newly founded Federal Republic of Germany experienced an economic crisis in 1950. West Berlin, with its unusual circumstances as a divided city, experienced even greater hardship. When the western Allies introduced the West German mark into the West Berlin economy in 1948, the Soviets retaliated by cutting off all access to West Berlin. The heroic “Berlin Airlift,” when American and British forces airdropped food, fuel, and supplies for over ten months from 24 June 1948 to 12 May 1949, saved the western sector. While the airlift sustained the city and ended the blockade, when it was over, 40 per cent of the population was still unemployed.

By the late 1950s, however, post-war European economies, including Turkey’s and West Germany’s, began to recover. After the Second World War, Turkey transitioned from a single- party dictatorship to a multiparty system, culminating in the Democratic Party’s electoral success in May 1950. Under the new Adnan Menderes government in the 1950s, Turkey experienced a push to mechanize agriculture, resulting in widespread poverty among small farmers and rapid and widespread migration into cities and metropolitan centers. In 1954, Prime Minister Menderes visited West Germany to strengthen the bilateral economic relationship between West Germany and Turkey, and, as a result, in 1955 officials signed the German-Turkish Economic Agreement and the German-Turkish Cultural Agreement in Ankara. That year the West German economy expanded for the first time since the end of the Second World War, prompting extreme labour shortages across the country. This trend was common across Western Europe: in 1956 Chancellor Adenauer signed an agreement in Rome that would provide free transport for any Italian worker coming to Germany. To put Italy’s agreement with West Germany in perspective, after similar agreements followed, an estimated seven million Italians left their country between 1945 and 1970.³⁴ Labour agreements were not limited to state-level arrangements though.

In 1955 West German private businessmen and semi-official labour-recruiting institutes began making requests for immigrant workers, and in 1956 the Institute for the World Economy (IWE) at the University of Kiel made one of the first official requests for immigrant workers from Turkey.35 The IWE solicited the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs to request volunteer migrants for vocational training. In the same year, the BA reported that Turkish agricultural interns were “very orderly and hardworking and so far have shown no problems. The Turk appears to be … completely able to fit in and be useful.”³⁶ These initial positive results with unproblematic, solicited workers, however, are rarely remembered, and the pre-1961 migration phase – before the formal bilateral agreement was signed – was strikingly different from the subsequent period of depersonalized mass migration for low-skilled and poorly remunerated jobs that made up the bulk of the “guest worker migration.”

Guest worker programs intersected two key post-war phenomena – explosive economic growth coupled with mass migration movements, with each fueling the other in turn. West Germany’s post-war period is known as the Wirtschaftswunder, or “economic miracle.”³⁷ In fact, by 1958, defeated West Germany’s economy was larger than that of war victor Great Britain’s.³⁸ Between 1950 and 1973, German GDP per head more than tripled in real terms.³⁹ Germany’s impressive growth was not necessarily miraculous, though, because pre-war investments in industry and armaments updated factories, the majority of which (83 per cent, in fact) survived the war. After all, in 1945, 55 per cent of Germany’s total industrial plant capacity was at most only ten years old.⁴⁰ In short, German transportation and housing, not industry, had been destroyed in the war, preconditions that created fertile ground for post-war guest worker programs. Across Western Europe, as available labour supplies – including colonial immigrants, displaced persons, and prisoners of war – dried up, governments increasingly turned to guest worker programs. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, Western European economies were markedly different from earlier in the post-war period as economies recovered. In the new economy, states increased production by increasing the number of workers – a Fordist model that would boom and then bust with the 1970s oil crises.

Another important piece of historical context was the integration of the European economy in this same period. First the “Korean Crisis,” or “Korean Boom,” created a global goods shortage that encouraged the purchase of West German goods despite post-war resentment of the country.⁴¹ Second, the Treaty of Rome, effective 1 January 1958, created the new European Economic Community (or EEC), linking Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany. Tony Judt argues that the EEC was more important symbolically than economically, as it was “grounded in weakness,” depended entirely upon an American security guarantee, and did not offer significantly new innovations.42 While the terms may not have been novel, this integration, especially creating the conditions for the Common Market and a supranational parliament, was important for continuing and expanding cross-border trading and labour migration, offering reduced tariffs and the free movement of goods, currency, and labour. Post-war recovery for all of Western Europe relied on cross-border cooperation and increasingly on trade with West Germany.⁴³

The post-war drive towards growth as well as the labour shortage spurred West Germany and Western Europe to invest at the state level in formal bilateral agreements to import foreign labour, which became a key part of mass migrations from the 1950s through the 1970s. Belgium, the UK, and France were the first to sign bilateral labour agreements after the Second World War when they negotiated with Italy in 1946. In 1948, the Netherlands and Switzerland followed suit. West Germany signed its first bilateral recruitment treaty in 1955, also with Italy. Before the 1960s, Belgium added agreements with Greece and Spain, and France with Greece. Sector-tied agreements were also common in this period with the intent of limiting the impact that migrant labourers could make on their host societies by restricting them to certain jobs and skill levels. The causality of the post-war economic growth is nuanced: did the booming levels of post-war production spur the migration influx, or did the importation of labourers spur the post-war production to new heights?

Supranational organization distinguishes post-war guest worker programs of the late 1950s and 1960s from those of previous eras. High-level organizing characterized this new era: the International Labour Organization (ILO), Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and Council of Europe all organized bilateral and multilateral agreements that resulted in a free exchange of foreign workers.⁴⁴ In the years 1946 to 1960, Western European countries had primarily recruited Italian workers and only in modest numbers; in fact, the number of foreign guest workers in Europe remained largely insignificant until 1961.⁴⁵ Also, new in the 1960s was that recruiting countries introduced policies to attract workers in large numbers, especially from the more desirable southern European countries of Italy, Spain, Greece, and Portugal because of their European “cultural characteristics” and compatible Cold War political leanings.⁴⁶ Another modification in the 1960s was that as the demand for workers increased, recruiting spread to regions not previously considered, including North Africa and Turkey. France, for example, looked to Turkey in 1965 when it could not get enough applicants from Italy, Spain, and Portugal.47

Many Western European recruiting countries, however, considered the Turkish Republic and many of the other countries included in this second wave of labour recruitment, such as Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and Yugoslavia, less desirable than Italy and the other more “European” countries of the first wave.⁴⁸ Scholars are divided on how wary West Germany was of signing a bilateral agreement with Turkey. Some historians have wondered whether the soured relationship between Turks and Germans from the 1970s on caused scholars to project backwards a negative view.⁴⁹ Conversely, others have noted that West Germany’s initial hesitation about Turkish workers stemmed instead from a German fear that taking in Turks, whom Germans viewed as only “partly European,” would open a floodgate for recruits from other non-European countries, such as those in Africa and Asia.⁵⁰

When Greece and West Germany entered into a bilateral agreement in 1960, though, the traditional rivalry ignited and the Turkish diplomatic mission in Bonn accused West Germany of favouring Greece over Turkey – a fellow NATO member. Understandably, Turkish officials were disappointed in West Germany and other Western European countries’ wariness, which included grouping Turkey with North African countries instead of with other Mediterranean countries. Turkey wished to be seen as it saw itself – as having an economic system, a defence system, and political values akin to Western Europe’s.⁵¹ Indeed, Turkey justified its participation in bilateral agreements domestically by arguing that it was participating in the European political and economic community.⁵² The Turkish Republic was also interested in limiting its workers’ time abroad so that they could boost the Turkish economy with their newly acquired skills.⁵³ West Germany did not view Turkey as it wished to be seen, however, and the resulting agreement between Turkey and West Germany placed Turkey in an unfavourable position.

On 30 October 1961, officials signed the formal agreement between the Federal Republic of Germany and the Republic of Turkey, and the BA opened a liaison branch in Istanbul. The agreement was less favourable for Turkey than treaties with other European applicants though. For example, West Germany required that Turkey send a higher percentage of skilled workers than had been required in other agreements.⁵⁴ Germany recruited more skilled labour from Turkey than from Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain combined.⁵⁵ By the end of 1961, seven thousand Turks were in West Germany. West Germany could not afford to remain picky though. As Western Europe recruited more workers, West Germany found itself competing with other European countries, such as France, for workers, adding urgency to its recruitment efforts.

Both German employers and the BA were acutely aware of West Germany’s disadvantages in relation to other Western European countries – a lack of colonial labour migration and the Berlin Wall’s stemming of Eastern European population flows. West Germany’s high turnover and initial rotation system not only were annoying for employers but also prompted additional recruitment and training costs. West Germany had to be proactive in its recruitment and responded by opening four hundred recruitment offices throughout the Mediterranean Basin to attract additional workers. West Germany also used grandiose ceremonies, prizes, and speeches both to show appreciation for the steady flow of workers and to recruit new ones.56 It was in this particular context of urgency and increasing need that West Germany began its labour migration negotiations with the Turkish Republic.

The agreement between Turkey and West Germany was also a special case. For the first time, the German government was paying social benefits to citizens of another country that itself did not have a social security system. All foreign workers legally employed were entitled to the same pay as West Germans for the same work and to full welfare and social rights, such as child benefit payments for children left behind in Turkey.⁵⁷ In the years 1969 to 1973, Turks became the largest contingent of foreign workers in West Germany and also made up a sizeable population in neighbouring Holland and Belgium.⁵⁸ In addition to the agreement with West Germany in 1961, the Turkish Republic signed accords with Austria, Belgium, and the Netherlands in 1964; with France in 1965; and, in 1967, with Sweden.⁵⁹

Turkey’s political and economic leadership envisioned its own economic miracle in the 1960s, one that far exceeded serving as a passive supplier of low-skilled labour. The Turkish Republic played a large role in shaping the guest worker program because it was seen as an essential part of Turkey’s economic, social, and cultural reconstruction after the 1961 modernizing revolution. The bilateral labour agreements were themselves attempts to continue the “Westernizing” project that formed the Turkish Republic’s cornerstone at its inception.⁶⁰ Indeed, throughout the twentieth century, Turkey took numerous steps, in the words of the political reform movement the Young Turks, to “follow the path traced by Europe.”61 Historian of Turkey Erik-Jan Zürcher has argued that even though more than 90 per cent of Turkey is located geographically in Asia, it is a creation of “Europeans” who shaped the country in their own image, with “Europeans” referring to the elite band of educated men who formed the modern republic in the 1920s.⁶²

In the latter half of the twentieth century, Turkish officials furthered Turkey’s alignment with the “West,” including gaining membership in the Council of Europe in 1949, with NATO in 1952, the OECD in 1961, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in 1973, and in the “Group of Twenty,” or G20, industrial nations in 1999. The “West” also turned to Turkey as an ally throughout the twentieth century, such as when the United States extended the 1947 Truman Doctrine to include Turkey in order to secure the Bosporus Strait. In many ways, the bilateral agreement between Turkey and West Germany fits in with Turkey’s twentieth-century trajectory, just as it fits into West Germany’s post-war economic recovery. The Turkish Republic saw itself and its citizens as part of a specific modernizing project. By contrast, emigrating Turkish nationals had multiple intersecting identities, such as Alevi, Kurd, or Sufi, and had equally diverse agendas for their move to Western Europe.

Considering Turkey’s twentieth-century Westernization and general trajectory of political, economic, and social developments, it is not surprising that guest worker agreements complemented the Turkish Republic’s “modernizing” efforts.⁶³ Indeed, the Turkish Republic elected to participate in the guest worker program with West Germany out of a sanguine view of development and modernization theories that were popular at the time, citing remittances, family unification and settlement abroad, and more highly skilled manpower returning to work at home as likely benefits.⁶⁴ Turkish policymakers expected the guest worker arrangement to help develop poor regions; alleviate unemployment; train workers who would later develop Turkish industry; and, through wage remittance and personal investment, invigorate the Turkish economy.⁶⁵ The noted sociologist Nermin Abadan-Unat, who conducted a government-sponsored study of Turkish workers in Germany in 1964, concluded that, at the time, the Turkish Republic in fact thought of guest worker programs as an aspect of “social engineering” in the hopes of generating economic and political change for the country.⁶⁶ In 1963, Turkey embarked on its first “Five-Year Development Plan,” which featured bilateral guest worker arrangements as not only a logical solution to the high unemployment rate but also a way to strengthen ties with Western Europe.67 Whether or not scholars have historically recognized Turkey’s “Western modernity” or considered it a part of the “Western Bloc,” significantly, the 1960s Turkish government and federal planners most certainly did.

While the Turkish Republic was looking to its future, the guest worker program provided the Federal Republic of Germany with an outlet to deal with its recent past. Social interactions among ethnic Germans and foreigners, the economic miracle, transnational labour movements, and historical reconciliation all intersected with the guest worker program in important ways. For Elif, for the German employer concerned with Germany’s “calling card,” and for BA recruiters in Istanbul, the guest worker program provided an important test case for the new Federal Republic. This book offers a closer look at one small population, an eclectic group of workers from Turkey who chose to remain in Germany and to share their life stories in interviews. The chapters provide a bottom-up view of the overlapping themes of post-war Germany. This is a small sample, to be sure. But, despite their initial optimism and self-defined successes, this is not a story of brav (or “well-behaved”), well-integrated former guest workers either. True, they are the ones who stayed, made homes, transitioned from migrants to immigrants, and saw the program as an opportunity to conquer. But they were also often ones to break, ignore, and negotiate guidelines and rules. The events of the first three chapters – the recruitment, transportation, arrival, and housing experiences – necessarily lead to the personal and political protests of the final two chapters. This book narrates cases that highlight larger themes – such as the connection between feeling excluded and seeking to escape and the necessity of learning how to work around and bend even the strictest of rules, including the East German border crossing. These idiosyncratic stories demonstrate the inability of complex human narratives to neatly propel a linear historical narrative, government publication, journalist’s questions, or politicians’ conclusions. And yet these stories have an undeniable importance and influence, as they form the grounds for the evolving debates on post-war Germany’s struggles with its historical legacy.

This book demonstrates that important negotiations happened far below the state level: in internal memos, German officials worried about the messages they were sending, about how and whether their plans were being implemented, and they were attuned to circumstances deemed inhumane. Simultaneously, applicants struck deals and negotiated, for example, with local doctors to pass their medical exams; fought with their dormitory managers in Essen, Germany; seduced German women in nightclubs in both West and East Berlin; and joined forces to protest their wages. However, these actions were not always seen, acknowledged, recorded, or remembered. Since the 1980s, German scholars and politicians have debated and at times lamented that ethnic populations exist in a Parallelgesellschaft, or “parallel society,” in which ethnic or religious migrant minorities live with limited cultural and spatial contact with the majority society.68 German Chancellor Angela Merkel made waves with her 2010 critique of parallel societies when she announced that “multiculturalism” had “utterly failed.”⁶⁹ Though journalists seized on this phrase alone, taken in context, her point was that the existence of parallel societies had contributed to integration problems. Indeed, Merkel commented that Germans have had a long and troubled history of deceiving themselves about “their foreigners.” The integration debate also cuts both ways, as demonstrated by a 2011 campaign rally with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Cologne, Germany, in which he declared in the heart of the Rhineland: “They call you guest workers, foreigners, or German Turks … [But] you are my fellow citizens, you are my people.”⁷⁰ The history of contact and negotiations between minority and majority populations continues to intersect with current political debates within the broader historical narrative.

Who Are “Turks”?

One main concern in both political and academic discourse about guest worker studies has been how to talk about this heterogeneous population. Over the years, the term Türken, or “Turks,” has been used interchangeably with or in lieu of both Ausländer, or “foreigners,” and Gastarbeiter, or “guest workers,” as the “others” of West German society.⁷¹ “Turks” has erroneously implied a homogeneous community as well as the status of being forever foreign.⁷² Early studies of guest workers and ethnic minorities conducted in post-reunification Germany often focused on xenophobic violence against immigrant communities and commented on now famous photos of the graffiti that read “Türken Raus!,” or “Turks Out!”⁷³ However, “Turks” did not necessarily signify people of Turkish descent: the term was often used metonymically, representing the totality of Germany’s problems with ethnic enclaves. In 1991, two years after the Wall fell and two years into the ensuing economic crisis, featuring high unemployment in the East, disillusioned right-wing extremists began a series of indiscriminant attacks on refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants. Violence directed at the ill-defined group “foreigners,” as well as at German Jews, increased in step with the recession. The rise of extreme-right voting and government impotence on immigration questions and policies followed.74 It is important to note that nearly three million Germans protested in major cities in 1992 against violent extremism and in solidarity with foreigners in Germany.⁷⁵ However, violent arson attacks on Turkish families, which included the deaths of three Turkish girls in the western German cities of Mölln and Solingen, continued the following year. These attacks on ethnic Turks were particularly troubling, as these families were long-term, legal residents who had felt part of their communities. Significantly, the xenophobic attacks in the post-unification years demonstrated that for some Germans, a diverse group of asylum seekers, Eastern European refugees, and long-term legal residents formed a fictional whole – “foreigners” and often just “Turks.”⁷⁶

Just as the term “Turks” has often been used inaccurately, the label “guest worker” is problematic. The nomenclature guest worker is difficult, as the term itself is a misnomer. The workers West Germans began recruiting from southern Europe, North Africa, and the Mediterranean received contradictory messages about the permanence of their stays. Increasingly, they settled and produced children and grandchildren in West Germany, making it their home. Helmut Kohl, the last Christian Democratic chancellor before Merkel, insisted and kept repeating until being voted out of office in 1998 that Germany was “not a country of immigration.” And yet as Kohl repeated this mantra, the number of “foreigners” had swollen to nearly 9 per cent of the German population.⁷⁷ The state’s denial of immigration has had tangible effects – for example, official policies have discouraged guest workers and others from integration and citizenship requirements that were designed to keep certain foreigners on the outside while “blood Germans,” such as Russians with eighteenth-century German ancestors, were easily accepted despite their limited knowledge of the German language and lifestyle.⁷⁸ However, there are now four generations of ethnic Turks living in Germany, with varying degrees of fluency in both languages and with widely disparate lifestyles and religious, cultural, national, and ethnic allegiances. Studies on Alevis, Kurds, and other ethnic and religious groups break down the category of “Turkish guest worker” in useful ways, balancing the fact that Germany records national origin, not ethnicity.⁷⁹ Another important mark of heterogeneity is varying degrees of success and integration: over time, some Turkish-Germans have increasingly prospered – in politics, the arts, and business – while others have remained isolated in monocultural communities in ways typical of large diasporas.

This study follows earlier work seeking to understand the guest worker populations. Sociological studies, anthologies of interviews, and histories of labour and economics began the first wave of scholarship on the guest worker program in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Initially many attempted to contextualize the political and economic immigration narrative in the cultural background of the workers themselves by looking closely at life in Turkey and at family networks there in addition to how transition to Germany played out in the domestic sphere. This initial sociological wave attempted to draw particular attention to Turkish women’s lives with feminist scholarship, conducted in German, that at times characterized guest workers or members of their families solely as victims, an attitude exemplified in titles such as “Ignored, Stood Up, Oppressed” and “Where Do We Belong?”80 This early scholarship focused on the problems of integration and sought to expose the guest worker experience, wanting to speak on behalf of the foreigner population in a call to action.⁸¹ The 1975 film Shirins Hochzeit, or “Shirin’s Wedding,” one of the first films narrated from the Turkish female guest worker’s perspective, presented a cautionary tale of a woman’s exploitation both in the institution of marriage and as guest workers in West Germany.⁸² In Günter Wallraff’s Ganz Unten, or On the Bottom, the German journalist recounted his own fieldwork, during which he wore a disguise for a year to pose as a guest worker, as part of an exposé.⁸³ It is also noteworthy that the Turkish media emphasized exploitation and poor conditions of guest workers in West Germany, especially after the spread of satellite television access in the 1990s strengthened the connection of ethnic Turkish communities abroad to Turkey.⁸⁴

By the 1980s a solid body of cultural production – from film to Gastarbeiterliteratur, or “guest worker literature” – took on the weighty task of conveying a range of experience, complementing existing scholarly perspectives.⁸⁵ Turkish-German authors, often writing in German, document their experiences of social, linguistic, and cultural isolation and offer a personal view into the broader demographic and cultural shift.⁸⁶ The use of the German language defined both their audience and their desire to record their own histories for a German audience. In turn, social scientists and historians through the 1990s built a robust literature around how groups arrived in West Germany, the types of organizations and alliances they made, their social problems, citizenship and xenophobia in Germany, and what these issues could tell us about how Germany did or did not deal with its dark past.87 Scholars collected interviews with foreign workers and constructed private archives and museum exhibitions, and the fight for recognition began, especially the recognition that Germany was indeed a “land of immigration.”⁸⁸

Many scholars, activists, and politicians throughout the 1980s–1990s centred their focus on a politics of recognition and engagement with the German government’s definitions and regulations for being “German.” With the Nazi blood-based citizenship laws in the back of many people’s minds, the government’s responses to non-citizens – ad hoc regulations, ambiguous policies, cultural initiatives, social programs, evolving naturalization rules, and resistance to dual citizenship – were deeply confusing at best.⁸⁹ Political discourse on schooling, language acquisition, and social programs for immigrant children were paradoxical: they were touted as important while the state and cities cut their funding and support.⁹⁰ Making sense of who guest workers were and why they belonged became infinitely more complicated as the gap in time between initial recruitment (when they arrived in West Germany) and the present (2017) widened. After the program officially ended in 1973 and as populations increased, larger question loomed: the German Left wondered if the state was too tolerant of Islam’s “restrictions” on women, such as headscarves, or worse of overt violence in the case of honour killings.⁹¹ The fact that the majority of guest workers from Turkey were Muslim presented perhaps the greatest cultural divide.

European states, especially West Germany, have skirted the term “race” in the post-war period. However in so doing, some slippage between racial, ethnic, and religious otherness has crept into the public discourse. Racial definitions have long been palpable in the German context but also in the postcolonial milieu of Western Europe, which includes both France’s pied noirs and Britain’s racial slur “Paki.” Languages present their own boundaries of understanding, communication, connection, and isolation. In terms of industry and globalization, labour migration was a transnational phenomenon, as employing foreign nationals broke down internal barriers in Western Europe.⁹² West Germany’s guest worker program was a small part of larger global trends during the post-war period, many of which included traversing multiple borders.

Yet the German case remains specific because of Germany’s unique history with foreign nationals and ethnicities, causing some scholars to insist on continuities with the Nazi past as a central part of the German guest worker program’s history.93 For others Nazi genocide tainted the concept of “race” in Germany with a specific historical association, causing its use to wane in the post-war period during discussions of guest workers in West Germany.⁹⁴ However, connections between West German attitudes towards foreigners and Germany’s Nazi experience have remained unavoidable and have constructed guest workers as racial others in ways they may not have been in the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1980s and 1990s as the first historical monographs on guest workers were published, both Klaus Bade and Ulrich Herbert argued that the guest worker program was part of a longer, complicated, and continuous history with foreign labour dating back to imperial times.⁹⁵ Herbert argued that it was a problem that Germans did not recognize the connection and continuity with their dark past: “There was no discussion in West German society in the 1960s about the historical fact that the importation of foreign labor during periods of economic boom was rooted in traditions extending back over many decades.”⁹⁶ However, as Christopher Molnar has pointed out when referring to Yugoslavian guest workers: “While this newfound emphasis on race in Germany’s postwar history has been salutary, an approach that puts race and racialization at the center of German interactions with resident foreign populations runs the risk of sidelining the experiences of foreign groups that Germans did not view in primarily racial terms.”⁹⁷ Turkish guest workers intersect several groups – post-war migrants, Muslim diasporas, and guest worker program participants – presenting a paradox: at times a rupture from and in other cases a continuation of a history of overt racism.

In the 1980s the idea of a “Turkish culture” – a Muslim one at that – emerged in popular discourse as distinct from and dangerous to German culture.⁹⁸ At the turn of the century, the German microcensus began counting the number of Muslims in Germany for the first time.⁹⁹ According to a 2000 parliamentary inquiry, the number of Muslims – a fictionally homogeneous group – in Germany lay between 2.8 and 3.2 million.¹⁰⁰ Even before the September 11 attacks focused media attention on Muslims, postcolonial migrations, asylum seekers, and guest workers had already settled in most major European cities during the post-war era. Accordingly media and scholarship turned their attention to these immigrant groups and their most visible members, Muslims (from Africa in France, for example, or from South Asia in Britain).¹⁰¹ However the events of 9/11 increased the scrutiny of Muslim ethnic enclaves and at times the rhetoric around it conflates radical Islam with mainstream Islam in troubling ways.102

It was in this context that, in 2005, the Turkish Republic began negotiations for full membership in the European Union. In response, prominent German historians Jürgen Kocka, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, and Heinrich August Winkler declared that “Turks” could not be “European” because of deeply ingrained cultural differences, introducing an ethnocultural definition of Muslims’ otherness within a Christian-defined Europe.¹⁰³ Among others, Joyce Mushaben has responded to such comments, noting that migrants’ religion had not previously been a primary consideration: “Though religion was never a factor in regulating either guest worker or refugee status prior to 1990 … Since September 11th, [however] political officials have nonetheless conflated religion with other cultural traits used to classify groups as ‘worthy’ or ‘incapable’ of integration.”¹⁰⁴ This conflation has not abated since: in August 2014, Der Spiegel, a popular German news monthly, ran a cover featuring the Turkish prime minister’s head set against the flag of the Turkish Republic and above a picture of the Blue Mosque. Beneath the image the subtitle reads: “Is Turkey still a free land?” The title and subtitle are printed in both German and Turkish. The edition also features a special sixteen-page insert solely in Turkish. In other words, almost a decade after the 2005 questioning of whether Turkey was European enough for the EU, Der Spiegel produced an inclusive bilingual edition while at the same time running a story once again questioning Islam’s compatibility with democracy and, by analogy, with Germany, a stalwart of Western democracy and economics. A major difference now, though, is how the point of view has changed: the 2014 article notes that compared with ten years earlier, when 73 per cent of Turkey’s population favoured joining the EU, now only 44 per cent support accession.

The historical legacy of the guest worker program, which recruited and imported workers enthusiastically, must fight its way through an overwhelming contemporary context and ever- evolving geopolitical constellations. Elif’s unique story could easily get buried amid media reports on headscarves, as they were not an issue among recruited workers. Elif easily found not only employment but also friends among her colleagues. This book focuses on the first generation in the 1960s and 1970s to provide a grounding perspective through which to consider contemporary media narratives, which can place “foreigners” at the centre of social problems and conflate them with a deep mistrust of Islam. Instead, this account reveals that West Germans feared other things, namely communism, domestic terrorism, and sexual liberation, much more than Islam in the 1960s and 1970s.

This book examines the experiences of Turkish guest workers before departure and on the way to West Germany, as well as daily life once they arrived. The West German officials involved and the attempts they made to control and regulate guest worker immigration, as well as their failures to do so, also play a central role in this narrative. Workers and officials alike took many small steps along the way to make workers’ stays in West Germany more permanent. At the same time, guest workers negotiated the process on their own terms, exerted control, and created social lives and spaces in ways not previously recognized. Turkish guest workers’ perspectives, which have long been missing from historical studies, are the focus of this book.105 These immigrants do not fit neatly into historical narratives about postcolonial Muslim migrants, as their relationship with their host country, as well as their citizenship status, was very different.¹⁰⁶ The details of everyday life reflect larger life decisions, provide the background for labour movements, and point to an answer to the question so many journalists, migration scholars, and former workers like Elif have asked: at what point does home no longer mean the place left behind? Workers’ first-hand experiences also complicate scholars’ assumption that only economic factors motivated migration. It is important to remember that these workers were invited and welcomed and had individual histories as they made new lives in Germany.

The first part of the book focuses on both the Turkish and German governments’ intentions, looking first at how the program began and was implemented in Turkey and second at how the first workers applied for and travelled to West Germany. Key arrangements for the program were negotiated behind the scenes, hidden from state-level political discourse, media attention, and the historical record – but, while concealed, these arrangements drove the narrative nonetheless. Both the new West Germany and the reconfigured Turkish Republic of the 1960s could impose their modernizing dreams on to the program. In so doing, post-war Germany, along with its place in the world and its relationship with foreign nationals, also evolved, devolved, and slowly worked its way into the contemporary situation – one of debates on immigration, Muslim minorities, and Germany’s role in the new Europe – enlivening press accounts as this book goes to press.

Understanding why Germany has had decades of debates on “multiculturalism” and “parallel societies” starts with asking how Germany’s demographic shifts occurred in the first place. In the case of former guest workers, it means considering the information they were or were not given, how West Germany recruited them, and how initial interactions and relationships were formed. Who were the first West Germans they met? The book’s first part addresses these questions of recruitment, original intentions, and initial interactions. The first chapter examines the bilateral treaties in greater detail, situating them as a vital part of the long post-war. This chapter also provides a working definition of the group “the first generation,” including making a case for the value of focusing particularly on Turks. In short, the first chapter explores the beginning of the guest worker program for Elif and many others, demonstrating how they transitioned from individual applicants into guest workers.

The second chapter focuses on how individual workers reflect on their initial impressions and experiences. Upwards of thirty million European and non-European labour migrants relocated to European industrial centres in the 1960s and 1970s, but this chapter begins with just a handful of ethnic Turks before they departed Turkey. It demonstrates the ways in which applicants attempted to maintain control within a strict, bureaucratic, and at times dehumanizing process. Inherent in oral history is a shift in the focus and perspective of knowledge production, as well as access to exactly the kinds of experiences that are less likely to survive in the archival record – those that are personal, local, and unofficial. Taken together, the first two chapters consider the very important notion of intent or the recognition that applicants, employers, and government officials had plans even if they could not come to fruition.

Significantly, part one positions the beginnings of the guest worker program in Turkey at least a full year before departure for Germany. These workers transitioned in this period into participants in industrialized post-war Europe. The third chapter turns to the German officials stationed at the liaison offices in Turkey, the ones who dealt with Turkish applicants first-hand while receiving instructions from Germany. They stood in the middle between the official regulations and plans and the lived reality that was often makeshift, ad hoc, and just plain chaotic. These beleaguered officials could rarely make both sides happy. Because they were unsuccessful, their efforts often went unseen, hidden from workers, who could only draw their own conclusions about Germany’s plans for them, long before departure.

“Guest workers” maintained their moniker even when not at work. The third chapter examines home and private life for the first generation. Life away from work unfolded in vastly different contexts, ranging from workers’ dormitories in West Germany to the discos of both East and West Berlin. In the third chapter, workers’ accounts of their lives in employer-run dormitories, as well as the notes of an external auditor, speak in tandem with the meticulous records kept by a dorm manager. Pieced together, these details unfold a picture of home life that shows how “parallel societies” did and did not form. In this chapter, I argue that considerations of integration, German identity, and social cohesion were worked out in small daily interactions between foreign workers and German managers, culminating in the larger issues and debates of the later 1980s. Workers’ reactions to their living situations and social experiences tell a lot about West German society’s ability to adapt to the major demographic shift occurring in its midst.

The second part of the book shifts the argument from intentions to realities and the creative ways in which particular guest workers acted out and fought back against their isolation and frustration with their situations. They formed new and remarkable alliances – mutual coalitions that served all sides. Personal and political negotiations on an everyday level demonstrated, before many even realized it, that they had embarked on a permanent life and investment in Germany.

The fourth chapter is a unique narrative of West Berlin-residing foreign workers, in this case men who crossed to East Berlin for social lives with East German women. Therefore, this is also a story of East German women’s actions and desires. Studying these two marginalized groups together changes Cold War history and the multiple, even symbolic, borders involved. To the East Berlin women, these foreign men served as a conduit for hard-to-obtain goods and even, through marriage, a way out. Ironically, these “Eastern” men represented Western consumer culture and found greater social liberty behind the Iron Curtain. In this chapter, I argue that these seemingly trivial social interactions reveal layers of meaning and agency and challenge the narrative of the tightly closed border and traditional political Cold War histories. Taken together, these examples change what we know about how guest workers lived and interacted with West and East Germans, who were and were not connected with the official program.

The status of guest workers evolved over time. They transitioned from Germany’s guests to “German workers,” especially through labour activism. The fifth chapter provides a counterexample of integration through a discussion of labour activism by intended and unintended German and non-German workers’ coalitions. Significantly, the early 1970s saw the beginnings of foreign worker-based labour movements that no longer distinguished foreign workers by nationality and included the first signs of solidarity among foreign and native-born workers. This chapter focuses on Turkish guest workers’ experiences in the workplace and, in the early 1970s, their increased interest in workers’ rights. In the case of labour activism, ethnic origins became less important in light of potential gains for all workers, hinting at workers’ long-term investment in Germany. I argue that before the 1973 recruitment ban, which many credit with prompting former guest workers’ permanent settlement in West Germany, labour activism signalled social citizenship, or the desire to stay, invest, and develop lives in Germany permanently.

At its core, this book aims to fundamentally shift the history of the guest worker program, considering multiple, sometimes conflicting, viewpoints in conversation rather than two sides locked in debate about integration or multiculturalism. Before parting, Elif said to me, “Thank God that we didn’t speak German [well] then … because then I would have understood everything, and it would have bothered me.”107 Her future in Germany and her role in its history were not certain. Instead they developed over time. She concluded: “[At] a certain age, people mull their lives over … your thoughts work through your past … When you don’t consider your past as personal history and family history, then you can’t build your future.”¹⁰⁸ This book’s exploration of individual histories enriches our understanding of guest workers’ struggles as well as their achievements, while shedding light on the complexities of some immigrants’ strategies for negotiating an uncertain status, which sometimes involved devising innovative ways of manipulating alliances with ordinary citizens and governmental representatives in ways enabled precisely by their uncertain status in their new world. In short, recounting and analysing these personal histories culminates in a richer understanding of two rapidly evolving nations and their struggles to build a new future, just as the individual actors negotiated their own daily battles. At the same time, this investigation takes seriously the fact that the complexity of individual lives often is irreducible to clear representations of social movements. The remarkable individuality within this group of immigrants, in other words, means that their diverse stories do not fit neatly into the confines of clearly marked political movements.