The 1960s drew many Turks to Germany. But their integration has been uneven, writes DEREK SCALLYin Berlin
THE PLAN was clear: work in Germany for two years and return to his rural Turkish village with a big bag of cash on his back and a tractor in tow.
But fate had other plans for 72-year-old Sabri Aydin who, along with thousands of his countrymen, headed to Germany half a century ago as a gastarbeiter or guest worker.
No one could imagine then that a temporary labour agreement would become post-war Germany’s greatest social experiment, changing forever the face of German cities and even the very concept of German identity.
It was 1961 and German employers, anxious to keep the economic miracle going, were keen to fill labour shortages without driving up wages.
After test runs in Greece, Italy and Spain, West Germany turned its attentions to Turkey. Companies like Siemens and Thyssen went on recruitment drives in Turkish towns and villages and were overwhelmed with the response.
Applicants – all single men between 18 and 45 – were given a physical examination and, if accepted, vaccinations and a train ticket to Germany.
Arriving in a suit and tie in November 1961, Aydin was handed a jumpsuit and helmet and put to work in a coal mine near the western city of Duisburg. He earned 650 deutschmarks a month and lived in a dormitory block with 120 other men from Anatolia – with little contact with Germany, Germans or the German language.
No one saw the need to offer integration measures as the 1961 agreement contained a “rotation clause” to limit a worker’s stay to just two years. But German employers, wanting to avoid the cost of training new arrivals, insisted that the clause be removed in 1964. Turkish workers, mentally living out of a suitcase, began to consider a longer stay. Faced with a series of military coups in their homeland, they applied for residency permits and permission to bring over their families, and set up home in low-cost neighbourhoods.
New Turkish-dominated inner-city ghettos had begun to spring up when, shaken by the oil crisis, Bonn ended the labour agreement in 1975. About half of the 825,000 Turks living in West Germany at the time returned home. But what to do with those who remained? By the 1980s, successive government integration reports had gathered dust in ministry drawers while politicians from the ruling Christian Democrats (CDU) insisted that Germany was “not a country of migration”.
Eventually, Germans were finally confronted with the reality of their immigrant neighbours’ lives in 1985 when journalist Günther Walraff went under cover as a Turkish migrant to expose the conditions of gastarbeiter life. “We were the third-class workers, working without any protection in the poisonous clouds of Europe’s largest steel plant,” he said. “I left the job with a souvenir of my stay – severe bronchitis – but many colleagues later died of cancer. They were mocked for doing the work no German wanted to do – often for 16 hours a day.”
Today some 1.6 million people with Turkish citizenship or roots live in Germany: the original migrant workers, their children and grandchildren. Though still a political hot potato and the subject of endless, emotional media debate, slow progress is being made to address the gastarbeiter legacy.
A decade ago, a reform of the citizenship laws allowed Turkish citizens to apply for German citizenship – though only if they gave up their Turkish passports. Today, Turkish names are an increasingly common sight in news broadcasts, doctor’s surgeries and football teams.
But the mutual self-deception of temporary gastarbeiter lingers on in the social statistics: one-fifth of Turkish citizens living in Germany have little or no command of the German language; about one-third of young Turks or Germans with Turkish roots leave school without the equivalent of a Leaving Cert.
In the media, migration stories are either scare stories about honour killings and radical Islam or well-intentioned, patronising reports about “successful immigrants” – young people born and bred in Germany.
Some of the pragmatic third generation of Turkish migrants are getting on with their lives, integrating into German society while documenting their experiences in best-selling books and popular plays. One of the most successful German films this year was the comedy Almanya, written and directed by the grandchildren of Turkish immigrants, that took a refreshingly light-hearted look at the gastarbeiter experience.
Like many from the first generation of Turkish immigrants, Aydin seems at peace with his decision to come to Germany 50 years ago, even if it has left the pensioner uncertain about his place in the world.
He spends much of the year in his home village in eastern Turkey, but comes back to Germany regularly to see his children and grandchildren.
“We are neither Germans nor are we Turkish any more,” he says. “We are the in-between people.”