Conclusion: Good Intentions and Contested Histories

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In 2013, after a thirty-year embargo, a top-secret document of the British National Archives was released: the meeting minutes from a private discussion between Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl on 28 October 1982. The newly elected Kohl wanted to keep the meeting a secret because he was presenting a plan he did not feel the German public was ready for – a radical plan to reduce the number of Turks in West Germany by half within four years. Kohl explained his rationale to Thatcher by saying that Turks “came from a very distinctive culture and did not integrate well” and therefore put West German society at risk. Kohl provided multiple examples, ranging from illegal employment to forced marriages, to demonstrate what he called “a clash of two different cultures.”1 As a point of comparison, he noted, “[West] Germany had no problems with the Portuguese, the Italians, even the Southeast Asians because these communities integrated well.” Kohl’s words were telling, as was the media response to the document’s recent release. Der Spiegel ran the story of the top-secret meeting in 2013 as a big reveal, but the history of the two decades following the official end of guest worker recruitment in 1973 plainly demonstrates that the West German agenda to send the guests home was far from secret. At best, the West German government was indecisive about how to stop the migration it had begun. Indeed, how and when the guest worker program really ended remains debatable.

The West German Ministry of Labour in Nuremberg announced on 23 November 1973, that it could “no longer accept any foreigners” into West German territory.² Federal Labour Minister Walter Arendt, together with the Federal Cabinet, drew on the Federal Labour Promotion Act for the authority to halt guest worker recruitment. In 1973, both the oil shocks and labour unrest had made the maintenance of the guest worker program unattractive if not untenable. Before the recruitment stop, the Labour Ministry had taken measures to quell new foreign labour by raising the employer-paid recruitment fee from DM300 to DM1,000, but more drastic measures were needed. According to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Arendt referred to the recruitment stop as precautionary and saw “no reason for serious concern.”3 Apprehension was not so easily subdued, however: West German employers and emigration countries both hoped the recruitment stop was temporary.⁴ While the 23 November measure was indeed “precautionary,” it stuck and ended formal recruitment.

The energy crisis and labour unrest were not the sole reasons for terminating the guest worker program though. With thoughts that anticipated Kohl’s concerns, the Federal Labour Ministry also referenced an increasing number of attempts to “counteract the ‘concentration’ of foreigners in certain cities,” implying that social and cultural concerns had prompted the recruitment stop even more so than economic ones.⁵ To put these concerns in context, at the time of the announcement, Turks made up 23 per cent of all foreigners in West Germany, with the next highest population being Yugoslavians at 20 per cent.⁶

West Germany’s conflicting ideas about and, at times, disdain for foreign populations were well known. In a 1973 study published by the Istanbul Institute of Economic Development, the authors, Duncan Miller and İhsan Çetin, reflected many Germans’ concerns and referred to the period from 1972 to 1973 as one in which Turkish workers in West Germany experienced a “sudden metamorphosis from beauty to beast.”⁷ This “metamorphosis” alluded to foreign workers’ transition to a “source of unforeseen industrial costs, a heavy drain on public services, and, as a seemingly permanent underclass, a threat to social and political stability.”⁸ More interesting, though, are the authors’ revelations about the hidden problems of ending the guest worker program. According to the study, the German workforce had, in fact, been in a steady decline since 1960 and was projected to remain so through 1985, creating a labour shortage – a revelation incongruous with the recruitment stop.

Various West German labour initiatives sparked the indigenous labour decline, including increased vacation leave, shortened working hours, pensions for those younger than sixty years old, increased disability pension coverage, and the general Western European attitude of valuing leisure time and recuperation, such as enjoying the popular employer-funded Kur program, or “to take a cure.” According to Miller and Çetin, only an influx of foreign workers could sustain the West German economy for the foreseeable future, as in 1972 when the West German workforce fell by 180,000 workers and 170,000 incoming foreign workers offset the loss.9 The decline would continue, and “the German economically active population [would decrease] by another 1.2 to 1.85 million workers by 1985.”¹⁰ The crux of the authors’ argument was that foreign workers continued not to supplant German workers but rather to make up for their shrinking numbers and, further, to support their Western European lifestyles and attitudes about work and workers. Foreign workers’ benefits outweighed their costs. This conclusion was at best unrecognized and at worst unpopular and ignored.

Ending recruitment changed little, however. Scholars have long written that the end of the recruitment prompted many foreign workers to settle their families in West Germany because they feared that if they left West Germany in 1973, they might not be allowed to return from Turkey – a non-European community member.¹¹ The early 1970s also marked the years when many workers moved out of employer-supplied dormitories and into neighbourhoods together with family members who had joined them from Turkey.¹² By 1974 the Turkish Labour Placement Bureau [İş ve İşçi Bulma Kurumu] reported that 55 per cent of Turkish workers stayed abroad more than four years, up from just 17.2 per cent in 1968.¹³ Ironically, at the time when workers were more likely to stay, larger economic forces, conservative responses, and increased resentment by the general public encouraged not just ending recruitment but also actively pursuing policies to send foreign populations home.

End of an Era

The end of the guest worker program occurred when much of Western Europe was dealing with both a financial crisis and the aftermath of migration prompted by what historian Tony Judt termed northwest Europe’s “insatiable demand for labor” and postcolonial immigration to European metropoles.¹⁴ The demographic events of the 1950s and 1960s came to a head in the 1970s and 1980s in a predictable way. As a result, demographics pressured states to develop stances on key issues, stances that would have lasting impacts in the subsequent decades. And yet, unlike other Western European countries, Germany did not develop a “regularization” program for illegal immigrants participating in the underground economy. Belgium, France, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States all developed regularization programs in this period. Regularization (also referred to as amnesty, normalization, and legalization) remains a controversial term for states looking to deal with illegal or unauthorized immigration, as well as those mired in unclear citizenship and naturalization processes.15 Social scientists Stephen Castles and Mark Miller characterize the period beginning in the 1970s as a quest for control in which key industrial democracies sustained efforts to contain and prevent illegal migration and the skirting of immigration regulations.¹⁶ France’s first socialist president, François Mitterrand, employed the Ministerial Order (and subsequent orders) between 1981 and 1982 to implement the regularization of immigrants who had been in the country before 1 January 1981, and who had either proof of stable employment or a work contract. France’s attempts at regularization were short-lived: when faced with rising competition from the more right-wing National Front (FN), the government attempted to curry favour with the electorate by reverting to more conservative ideas, such as a repatriation scheme that compensated migrants for returning to their home countries.¹⁷ After the 1986 election made Jacque Chirac prime minister under Mitterrand, more conservative laws came into effect, especially now that the FN had a seat in parliament. As a result, the zero-tolerance anti-immigration Pasqua laws of 1986 facilitated immigrant expulsions and deportations. In other words, across Western Europe, increasingly conservative governments dealt with both temporary workers and immigrants harshly in the 1980s, initiating the end of an era.

After the 1973–4 oil shocks slowed the world economy, many Western European countries radically altered not just industrial production but also national attitudes about foreign workers. The crisis was not temporary. Oil prices rose again from 1981 to 1982, and, accordingly, West Germany experienced economic recession from 1982 to 1983. A conservative political turn accompanied the early 1980s economic downturn, with the election of Ronald Reagan in the United States, Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, and Helmut Kohl in West Germany – the result of a conservative coalition of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the Christian Social Union (CSU), and their allies the Free Democratic Party (FDP) in 1982.¹⁸ According to historian Rita Chin, conservative rhetoric on the “foreigner question” played no small part in engendering this conservative political turn. Indeed, the CDU attacked the preceding, more liberal, Social Democratic Party’s (SPD) “willful neglect” of foreign populations’ drains on social infrastructure in the name of its failed “integrationist policy.”19 In short, the CDU gained support as the SPD’s “foreigner” policies failed. Before the election, the conservative parties outlined proactive solutions such as rotation policies and, philosophically, transferred the work of integration solely to the immigrants, who were to “Germanize” on their own.²⁰ After recruitment ended in 1973, foreign populations were increasingly seen as problematic. This perspective seemed prescient of Kohl’s 1982 comments, which singled out “Turks” as less easily integrated than say the Portuguese and Italians, and where most negative comments about foreigners were about the amorphous categories of “Turk” and “foreigner.”

By 1973 Turkish workers formed the largest group of foreign nationals in the West German workforce and every ninth worker in the Federal Republic was a foreign national.²¹ About 30 per cent of workers returned home each year in the 1960s, but in the 1970s lengths of stay began to rise steadily.²² Chancellor Brandt, who preceded Helmut Schmidt and Kohl, in his January 1973 address, stated: “We should carefully consider where the absorptive ability of our society has been exhausted and where social common sense and responsibility dictate that the process be halted.”²³ Furthermore, there was a large discrepancy in West Germany, as was common in many Western European countries at this time, between the number of employed foreign workers and the total number of foreign nationals. In November 1973, West Germany had 2.6 million employed foreign workers out of a total foreign population of 4 million. While the number of employed foreigners in West Germany fell to between 1.8 and 1.9 million in the late 1970s, the total foreign population remained unchanged at 4 million, with about 1 million from Turkey.²⁴ Foreign workers, who feared they might not be able to re-enter West Germany if they went home, brought their families to Western Europe regardless of their employment status. The foreign population in West Germany increased to 4.5 million by 1980.²⁵

As the economic downturn intensified, governments stepped up efforts to coax foreigners into leaving on their own. Several Western European countries, including France, West Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands, implemented “pay-to-go” programs, in which governments offered incentives – bonuses, paid travel expenses, the reimbursement of social security contributions, and unemployment compensation – for both employed and unemployed guest workers to return to their countries of origin.²⁶ On 28 November 1983, the same year that West German unemployment reached a post-war record of 2.3 million, West Germany implemented its own pay-to-go program. The Federal Republic introduced a new law for the “Promotion of Readiness to Return,” which included a monetary incentive of DM10,500 for unemployment benefits to foreign workers to encourage them to return to their countries of origin.27 However, out of millions, only about 250,000 foreigners, mostly Turks, took advantage of the opportunity.²⁸ On the whole, these programs did not necessarily lead to a decrease in the total number of foreigners, especially in West Germany.

Monetary incentives from the West German government were not the only considerations for former guest workers; there was also the question of where to go. Events in Turkey also affected immigration and emigration decisions. Political unrest and ethnic conflict in Turkey influenced the rise of emigration to West Germany in the late 1970s and early 1980s. On 12 September 1980, General Kenan Evren headed a coup d’état, during which he enacted martial law, abolished the parliament, suspended the constitution, and banned all political parties and trade unions in Turkey. Two significant factors impacted outmigration from Turkey before the coup as well. First, the Turkish economy was in free fall with three-digit inflation, a chronic foreign trade deficit, and widespread unemployment. Second, unprecedented political violence between rival factions led to a death toll of around five thousand in the late 1970s. In sum, the Turkish Republic was not necessarily attractive to returning workers in the late 1970s. The events in Turkey also provide the larger context for the rising number of Turks in West Germany after the official recruitment halt, including a significant and increasing number of Turkish and Kurdish asylum seekers. Clearly, there were forces in Turkey that discouraged Turks from returning there, but as the case studies in this book have emphasized, these decisions were at their core ultimately personal and not necessarily driven by larger trends.

Guest Workers’ Daily Negotiations

While it is important to acknowledge the national forces driving immigration and responses to it, the case studies in this book, by their very nature, provide nuanced insight into how actual people negotiated their lives within the evolving context. As previous chapters have argued, there can be no stock narrative of the guest worker experience, as there will always be individuals who defy it. This book has purposefully focused on the outliers, a small set of individuals who, upon reflection later in life, emphasized that they had thrived despite negative experiences. In spite of terrible living spaces, these ethnic Turkish workers created homes and manageable, even interesting and fulfilling, lives for themselves where possible, enjoying the escapism of a disco, a new relationship, or maybe living a double life across the border – a guest worker during the week and a carefree Casanova on the weekends. The first part of this book focused on how the category of “guest worker” was constructed in a way that conflicted with individual guest workers’ understanding of their own identities – of lives and dreams frequently hidden from public view. The second part of the book revealed how at work and after work, through relationships both intimate and pragmatic, through formal or spontaneous moments of solidarity, these individuals transcended assumptions about their status as guests and as workers. Some Turkish workers formed unexpected alliances, personally and politically, as de facto German workers and, as such, achieved major national changes in the West German wage structure.

Though workers exerted influence where they could, nonetheless many endured horrible conditions. It is difficult not to ask why – despite negative experiences before departure, during travel, in their employer-supplied dormitories, in discriminatory West German society, and at work – these individuals ultimately decided to invest in West Germany.29 Yet to ask the question “why in spite of exploitation did workers stay?” is to see guest workers’ lives only as exploitation or only in terms of material conditions. It is also possible to recognize the ways workers invested in West Germany long before even they realized it. Even if workers had intended to stay temporarily when they arrived in West Germany, they already had a year-long relationship with West German authorities through the preparation stage and many had anticipated living in West Germany before that. Turkish guest workers further invested in new lives in West Germany when they took steps to create lives outside work. At some point workers transitioned from making a temporary situation seem tolerable to having something worth staying for, as was the case with personal relationships across borders as well as with striking workers. When she met with me, Elif did not hesitate to say: “Why should I leave? I like it here.”³⁰

The accounts in the second half of the book uncover moments of subversion, radical change, and uncanny alliances. For example, working with the Stasi to report on their countrymen challenged concepts of national loyalty, as did the intimate relationships many Turkish men pursued with East German women. In short, guest workers were individuals who took each condition and aspect of the program and transformed them, bending rules and defying norms, negotiating their lives on their own terms. These individuals fit uncomfortably if at all into any macronarrative of the guest worker program and disrupt, perhaps, more than explain. Measuring the success of the program is equally challenging.

Measuring Success

The Turkish government did not get what it expected from the guest worker program with West Germany. The Turkish economy did not see a significant post-war boom as other Western Bloc nations did, and the guest worker program did not achieve the goals the 1963 Turkish Five-Year Development Plan laid out. Republican Turkish labour historians have recently questioned the Western-centric ideas that modernity inevitably led to urbanization, industrialization, and secularization, especially through increased contact with the West. While the Ottoman Empire, both multi-ethnic and multireligious, influenced Europe, Africa, and Asia with its economy, politics, and culture, the Turkish Republic, by contrast, is a self-contained, secularly constructed nation state that looks to the West. Historians Touraj Atabaki and Gavin Brockett have recognized that the Turkish state’s evolution is mirrored in its history: “Modernist historians, both in Turkey and beyond, contrived a historical narrative after 1923 [when the Republic was founded] that was predicated upon a representation of the Ottoman heritage as disreputable and shameful.”31 To turn away from the dominant idea that Turkey developed solely through state-imposed modernization and contact with the West, historians of republican Turkish labour history argue that Turkish workers were, as Donald Quataert has written, “agents in their own right and not pliable and hapless tools of the state.”³² There is no better case study for assessing the impact of republican Turkey’s 1950s–1980s fraught modernization and westernization plans than the massive program designed to export Turkish citizens and then reintroduce them as Westernized labour to the Turkish economy. Guest workers like Elif and the many others included in this book were indeed agents in their own right, and each muddled the neat plans of both nation states, as well as their accepted national histories.

What did the bilateral agreements with Germany and other Western European nations provide for the Turkish Republic upon workers’ return? For the many Turkish workers abroad, return “home” before retirement age was largely unappealing, especially for those who knew Turkey could not offer skilled workers comparable favourable working conditions or wages.33 Turkish social scientist Ali Gitmez reported in 1977 that most Turkish workers preferred to wait for retirement before returning to Turkey: “They choose to come back to Turkey … [solely] to spend their years of pension ‘in peace’ and relative wealth … [Such] migrants who will never again join the Turkish workforce may be considered a complete loss for Turkey.”³⁴ Miller and Çetin concluded in 1974 that the bilateral agreements had a largely negative impact on the Turkish economy instead of assuaging economic pressures as had been hoped. They found that the emigration of workers from Turkey led to a high rate of labour turnover that crippled industrial expansion and caused more harm than good: “Many urban industrial employers especially in Istanbul are warning government officials that their labor force turnover rates have become intolerable and … will soon be inimical to industrial expansion.”³⁵ They continued by challenging the program’s premise: “Employers faced with … replacing experienced workers either must accept lower productivity and/or pay the cost of additional worker training. Indeed, for far too long it has been assumed that emigration is a costless ‘windfall gain’ to Turkey.”³⁶ Seen from the economic point of view, the program was a detriment to the Turkish economy. Indeed, it was a solution policy makers wanted to believe in more than actually examine.

Turkey also lost the currency influx of wage remittance once workers returned to Turkey, or when family members moved to Germany permanently, as wages were then spent solely in Germany. According to Gitmez, though remittances represented a large influx of currency into the Turkish economy, their impact was less significant: “The remittances are usually unorganized and used in unproductive small commercial ventures. This is inevitable if the savings are not controlled and the areas of investment are not organized accordingly by the government.”³⁷ The Turkish Republic’s modernizing plans and dreams of Westernization and uplift through the guest worker program were not realized in the program’s aftermath in the 1980s.

Many workers looked back on the Turkish authorities’ handling of the Turkish guest worker emigration with resentment, stating that the Turkish state cared more about doing everything in its power to meet West German employers’ and officials’ needs than about its own citizens’ wants and needs. “In general, the record of the Turkish policy of migration and of return migration has been one of almost complete neglect,” Gitmez reported of government policies. He concluded that the Turkish government gave its all to “dispatch as many workers abroad as possible and to do everything to satisfy all requests from receiving countries in terms of number, qualification, age, health, etc.”38 However, when it came to devising a plan for their return, re-employment, reintegration, a productive use of their savings, and their general integration in the larger economy, the government was silent.³⁹ Clearly, returning workers needed to define success in their own terms.

Despite the state-level failures to process return migration in a positive way, some workers did return successful in their own eyes. Gitmez found that 81 per cent of those who returned to Turkey after working abroad reported that they had had a positive experience.⁴⁰ “I am living in the village from now on,” reported a man who had gone to West Germany as a tourist and stayed for seven years. “I didn’t get any harm from working in Germany. I couldn’t have owned what I have now if I hadn’t gone to Germany. If I had the chance to go once more, I would buy a house in the city and live there.”⁴¹ Another man reported that five hundred people from his village, including most of the young men, had left for West Germany, saying, “There, eating, drinking, and having fun is plenty.”⁴² Speaking of those who had returned from Germany to his village, the same man reported: “We built roads in the village, built a high-school, bought telephone [sic]. These were all because of Germany. We have a lot of tractors, all belonging to Germaners [the made-up word for those who had lived in Germany].”⁴³ However, other former guest workers reported returning out of frustration with their West Germany employment situations, including constantly moving from low-paid job to low-paid job until they had given up to return to Turkey.⁴⁴

Many workers did not have homes in Turkey to go back to because they had sold their property to go to West Germany in the first place or because they no longer had strong social ties in Turkey. Some workers who returned had mixed feelings about it, as in the case of Murat, who told me in Istanbul that returning to Turkey was a huge mistake because he did not think he could earn enough to live there.⁴⁵ He said he also regretted leaving because he missed the social life he had once had in Germany, which included going to discos with German friends.⁴⁶

The era of family unification, in which Turkish spouses and children settled in West Germany by joining their relatives there, brought many changes to those who chose to remain and retire in West Germany. Some brought their children to study in German schools and universities, while others sought to reconnect with religious and cultural traditions from home especially after bringing their wives and children to Germany. One man, Ahmet, was persuaded to come to Berlin in 1969 after seven years of listening to overwhelmingly positive reports on life in West Berlin.47 An acquaintance reported earning DM3,500 a month in Berlin, an unbelievable amount. Ahmet sold off his store and possessions to move to Berlin, where he worked as a cleaner on an American military base. He got the job through a temporary employment agency that was exploiting foreign workers, offering no benefits along with a low salary of around DM700 a month. He sent money home from his personal savings to give the impression that he had not failed or made a poor choice. He eventually found the man who had told him he had been earning DM3,500 and accosted him. He discovered that the man was living in a dirty basement room. When he noticed that the man’s walls were decorated with pictures of Atatürk and a Turkish flag, he ripped the man’s flag off the wall, claiming that he did not deserve to have it, as he was a liar and deceiver. Ahmet also greatly resented the Turkish government and consulate in West Germany for, in his opinion, turning their backs on Turkish citizens abroad. To make matters worse, he also reported enduring years of xenophobia by Berliners.

Ahmet’s story was, however, still one of great success. In 1973, the year of the recruitment stop, he resettled his entire family in Berlin. He apparently said to his children: “It’s enough that one person in the family has had to have dirty, degrading work. You must study.”⁴⁸ Ahmet proudly reported that one of his daughters was the first Turkish girl to attend a German Gymnasium, or a rigorous college preparatory high school. She went on to major in sociology and spoke German, French, and Russian. His son studied architecture. By 1980 he reported that he had earned back his initial output of savings from 1969. In 1995 he was retired in Germany but reported that the money was less significant to him than the social welfare benefits and that, despite xenophobia, he had more benefits in Germany than he would have had in Turkey. Ahmet’s story is one of many personal histories that challenge the dominant narratives of minority life in 1970s through 1990s Western Europe. He might be a historic outlier, but his family ultimately benefited from his choices. He seized opportunities, negotiated his situation, and found the parts of the German system that were the most beneficial.

Settling permanently in West Berlin was the right choice for Elif too. In 1972 she was elected to the Betriebsrat, or workers’ council, demonstrating that she was seen as a leader at work among her German and foreign colleagues. In 1995 she reported that she was financially independent because of both social welfare assistance and her work as a babysitter and in her own craft store.

Another man, Remzi, who was selected in1966 by BMW in Istanbul, arrived in Munich by train and lived in a BMW dorm, which he considered modern for the time. In 1974, a year after the end of the official recruitment, he reported that BMW opened a newer dorm. The guest worker program did not really end in 1973 for him – he continued to live and work at BMW through the 1970s. His main concern, however, was how difficult it had been for him to practice his religion until 1975, when BMW opened another new dorm that included a mosque. He also went on to be elected to the Betriebsrat. Remzi noted that he had not experienced much xenophobia in Munich until the early 1990s, when he was told while boarding a subway car that the Germans should board first. In 1991 he received a certificate from the Bavarian Labour Ministry, BMW, and the German Metalworkers’ Union [IGM] commemorating his twenty-five years of work at BMW. Despite his positive experiences with BMW, however, he recalled that he had little to no contact with German co-workers or neighbours in all his years in Munich. The religious tolerance shown by BMW was not widespread in West Germany, and, decades later, debates of freedom of religion versus freedom from religion would come to a head in Western Europe. In sum, individual guest workers’ achievements varied greatly, even if their contributions as a collective population were great. Unfortunately, negative press on and attitudes about foreigners after 1973 effaced the nuance of the preceding era as political responses to migration intensified.

Lasting Impacts on Germany

The guest worker program revealed many areas in which the new state of West Germany seemed unable to escape its past. Various actions – including enforcing biological borders with medical exams; holding on to Nazi-era terminology for train “transports”; repurposing temporary housing from Nazi-era Fremdarbeiter, or “foreign workers”; and having antiquated ideas of gender roles in private relationships and at work – inevitably evoked West Germany’s dark past. Guest workers endured substandard conditions before, during, and after arrival in West Germany and reported exploitation at work, homesickness, and cramped living quarters. And yet for myriad reasons, which were personal, political, economic, and social, Turkish workers stayed, forever invested in their future despite signs that staying would prove to be a bad investment.

While this book has shed light on the intentions behind the program and the ensuing demographic shifts, assessing the legacy of the program is exceedingly difficult: it is often blamed for an aftermath of contemporary problems with minority communities in Germany, for which it created the context but not necessarily the subsequent course of events. Contemporary circumstances often overshadow the nuance of the program’s participants. In the early 1980s, the focus on the role of Islam among Turks in Germany came to the fore. Along with family reunification, which caused many Turkish families to want to bring up their children as Muslims in West Germany, Turkey’s banning of Islamist parties such as the National Salvation Party (Millî Selâmet Partisi, or MSP) contributed to a politicization of Islam and an increase in religiosity among Turkish migrants in Western Europe as banned parties set up among communities there. Different Islamic organizations vied for control over the Turkish diaspora in West Germany, including more radical groups that wished to see the Turkish Republic go from secular to Islamic. Take, for example, a 1982 rally that took place in West Germany: “The hands that reach for our head scarves will be broken” and “Muslim Turkey will be established!” read Turkish-language signs during a demonstration of almost fifteen thousand people protesting the headscarf ban in Turkish schools.49 An Islamist, right-leaning, Turkish-language publication reported positively on the event: “Before the march, they recited the Koran and sung the [Turkish] National Anthem with excitement.”⁵⁰ A local radio station accused the marchers of supporting the controversial Islamist Turkish politician Necmettin Erbakan.⁵¹ However, this rally did not take place in Ankara or in Istanbul but in Bonn-Bad Godesberg, West Germany, and the conflicting Turkish-language press reports (the newspaper versus the radio) were both from Cologne. In brief, two rival positions on the role of Islam in the Turkish Republic were fighting in West Germany on a Saturday afternoon.

West Germany became the testing ground for radical Turkish political groups and their accompanying publications – including ones that had been banned in Turkey for challenging the secular government and were later banned in West Germany for being overtly anti-Semitic. Islamic-leaning Turkish political organizations attempted to spread their influence, while Germany and the Turkish Republic (with a new constitution after a fresh military coup in 1981) sought to control and moderate them and in so doing helped define new national stances on the interlinking elements of religion, migration, politics, and national image. West Germany in the late 1970s and early 1980s was home to close to one million ethnic Turks and as such represented a transnational public sphere in which Turkish politics were created and acted out – these politics reached from Turkey to Germany and back again via the migrating Turkish population. The migrant community with its large membership and deep pockets was a contested ground on which Turkish political organizations vied for power and influence.

Indeed, after the inception of the guest worker program in the 1960s, the role of Islam in ethnic Turks’ daily lives in West Germany had both personal and political meaning. An Islamist identity could figure into self-definition in two ways: in West Germany, against the dominant Christian culture and in preservation of “Turkish culture”52 and, conversely, in Turkey, against secular elites and in opposition to secularizing efforts. The needs of Muslim migrants to reconstitute the basic conditions necessary to practice their faith – for example, halal food services or places of worship – along with their search for a community in which they felt they belonged, motivated the creation in the 1960s of loosely connected Islamic communities in Europe that spread significantly in the 1980s and beyond.⁵³ Over the years, Germany’s response to immigrant populations was to allow ethnic enclaves to persist in a strategy known as “parallel societies,” a condition that Chancellor Merkel declared had utterly failed in her now famous speech from October 2010. The situation of increasingly politicized Islamic populations in West Germany was neither unique to West Germany nor the final chapter of the story of the guest worker program. Just as the guest worker program began as one of many migration movements sweeping across post-war Europe, Germany’s situation was not unique and it was certainly not the necessary result of the guest worker program. Instead, political and social choices made by Western European policymakers played a much larger role in shaping the impact of demographic shifts than did the initial migrations that brought non-native populations in the first place. While the guest worker program did create the crucial conditions just by importing large numbers of Turks, it did not determine the outcomes.

On 7 January 2015, two radical Muslims, apparently funded by Al Qaeda, shot twelve people at the Parisian satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in retaliation for what they deemed disrespectful portrayals of Islam. The same day, the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister David Cameron and Germany’s Chancellor Merkel issued a joint statement condemning the attack on Charlie Hebdo. Merkel noted: “All of us that live in Europe strongly condemn these attacks … This is an attack against the values we hold dear, values by which we stand.”54 Two days later a separate attack occurred; this time, hostages (four of whom were killed) were taken at a Paris kosher deli. In Germany on the Monday before the first Paris attack, however, the newly formed anti-Islamic party Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West (Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes, or Pegida) held its largest demonstration ever in Dresden. Pegida’s central demands are a reduction in the number of foreigners entering Germany and tightened asylum laws in the country.⁵⁵

On the Saturday after the attack in Paris, though, thirty-five thousand anti-Pegida protesters marched in Dresden pre-emptively. They began with a minute of silence for the victims of the terrorist attacks in France and then continued with a march for tolerance, one jointly organized by the Dresden city and Saxony state governments. Protesters carried a banner reading: “Wall of Friendship without Borders.”⁵⁶ Despite the largest terrorist attack in recent French history occurring just days before, and even in a moment of renewed Franco-German support, the march for tolerance of Islam continued in the historic city. Anti-Pegida demonstrations were widespread and took place in Berlin, Cologne, and Stuttgart as well. How and whether contemporary problems should be linked to immigrant histories and migrations such as the guest worker program are complicated questions that deserve equally nuanced answers and investigations.

The events in January 2015 were just the beginning of a tumultuous year though. In May, Islamic State fighters seized territory in central Syria, and in June their control spread to north-eastern Syria as well. The civil war that began with the Arab Spring of 2011 culminated in a humanitarian crisis and an unprecedented wave of refugees and asylum seekers in Europe. In May 2015, media reports of 1.5 to 2 million Syrian refugees started to gain increasing attention as the refugees moved from Turkey and into the Balkan states.⁵⁷ (By the end of 2015, Germany alone had received a record 1.1 million migrants from outside the EU.)⁵⁸ On 31 August 2015, Merkel called for “European unity” in the face of a humanitarian crisis, reminding Europe of its open borders policy: “If Europe fails on the question of refugees, if this close link with universal civil rights is broken, then it won’t be the Europe we wished for.”⁵⁹ Lured in by Germany’s economy and welcome, millions were risking their lives to reach Germany despite the EU regulation that they be processed in the first European country they reached.60 Germany took on a “moral leadership” role through its efforts both to aid and welcome refugees and encouraged other European countries to do the same.

Significantly, Merkel saw a direct connection with Germany’s guest worker history and prior experiences with asylum seekers. On 9 September 2015, she stated that Germany needed to learn from the mistakes it made with guest workers and do things differently in 2015 to focus on integration from the start: “Those who come to us as asylum seekers or as war refugees need our help so they can integrate quickly,” Merkel told the German parliament.⁶¹ A month later a New York Times article, answering a London reader’s question about how to integrate the newcomers, responded: “Most politicians, planners and business people in Stuttgart and Berlin … [thought it] crucial to integrate the new migrants … providing not only language, education and job training but also access to the social and athletic clubs that bind many German communities.” Significantly, the paper pointed out the striking difference between the contemporary policies and those from the guest worker period: “[Focusing on integration] did not happen in the 1970s and 1980s with Turkish guest workers in cities such as Berlin, where for various reasons communities avoided mixing for years, and the consequences are still obvious.”⁶²

The hopeful and welcoming tone changed after the 13 November 2015 coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris and the New Year’s Eve attacks in Cologne. The honeymoon period was short-lived, and calls for stricter regulations began. Day after the Paris attacks, the news reports switched to headlines such as “Paris Attacks Shift Europe’s Migrant Focus to Security,” and once again, talk of integration evaporated.⁶³ Before the focus shifted, though, the immigrant crisis had prompted a new neologism in German Willkommenskultur, or the “culture of being welcoming,” similar to the early days of the guest worker program. Germany was again pleased to improve its humanitarian record on the world stage and in light of its dark past, just as the policy makers discussed in the first two chapters of this book were. By December 2015, Merkel was again calling for “humanitarian” efforts and revisiting her comments from 2010 that “multikulti” or “multiculturalism” had been a “sham” that stood in for Germany actually adapting to the reality that their assimilation schemes were inefficient and that they were indeed a country of immigration. The New Year’s Eve attacks on women in Cologne – during which one hundred women reported assaults, including sexual assaults, by men speaking foreign languages and apparently of North African and Arab backgrounds – soured the German public once again on the government’s acceptance of refugees, as many of them were blamed for the attacks.64 During the 2016 Cologne Carnival, despite increased police presence and low attendance, women again reported high numbers of sexual assaults; this time officials refused to release information about assailants’ ethnicities.⁶⁵

As this book is prepared for publication, it is hard to tell exactly what lessons were learned from the guest worker program. The idea that Germany never had sincere plans to deal with their guest workers is still prevalent, despite the findings in part one of this book that policymakers made attempts at regulations that failed during implementation. The actions of individual guest workers – such as attempting to learn German to take charge of their situations through the means available – are also excluded from media reports that characterize the impact of the guest worker program by stating “today, certain districts are still predominantly populated by citizens of Turkish origins, many of whom do not speak German fluently.”⁶⁶ While these claims are not necessarily false, they elide or ignore the more diverse range of behaviours and attitudes revealed in individuals’ stories in this book.

Contested Histories

Too often immigrant groups are blamed for not integrating or assimilating by not taking on European values, or are seen as the root of social ills. West Germany’s own culpability in creating social problems remains understudied. The facts of the guest worker program in the early 1960s will offer few answers to today’s debates until we see them as providing a new understanding of the larger context, one in which a different future was entirely possible.

In any event, the impact of foreign workers’ immigration on post-war Western Europe cannot be underestimated. The model of post-war labour migration, which occurred across Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, had similar effects regardless of the sending and receiving countries. In the 1970s and 1980s in West Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, foreign nationals began to settle permanently with their families, forever changing the social fabric of Western Europe and calling into question ideas of “new” and “old” Europe. While historians have long concerned themselves with the rebuilding of the economy, architecture, and governments of Europe in the post-war period, a closer look at the ways in which European governments and societies rebuilt (or eschewed rebuilding) the social fabric of Europe has little been noticed. Yet in this same period, migrants forced Europeans to reconstruct questions of identity, culture, and citizenship, as well as the walls and borders that defined belonging in the West or the East, whether figuratively or literally. The stories of workers like Erol, Elif, and Cahit break down stock narratives not only about guest workers from Turkey but also about minorities and Muslims in Europe. Appreciating the textures of the immigrant experience, including the inherent will and ambition needed to move somewhere new, requires reframing historical debates about who guest workers were and where they belonged.