The moment when guest workers departed Turkey was one of great rupture – not only for the guest workers themselves but also for the families they left behind. In all corners of Turkey’s vast landscape, from major cities and the Anatolian countryside, the news of West Germany’s urgent need for laborers had spread. Seeking to escape unemployment, gain wealth, or simply have an adventure, hundreds of thousands of young men and women flocked to the West German government’s recruitment offices. The largest one was in Istanbul, where 200,000 prospective workers applied each week.Footnote 1 Weary and hopeful, they filled out extensive paperwork, underwent humiliating medical examinations, and waited seemingly interminably for the result. Would they be accepted? Or would they be rejected on the grounds that they were too young, old, sickly, or disabled? Especially for those from rural Anatolia, the stakes of rejection were high. Having “scrambled together” thousands of lira, or even sold their fields and animals to afford the two-day car or bus ride to Istanbul, they feared returning empty-handed, to be greeted with disdain, disappointment, and a loss of prestige. “Not passing would have been a catastrophe for us,” one guest worker explained years later. “Those who did not pass cried like children.” They considered it a “matter of honor” and “did not have the courage to return to their villages.”Footnote 2
For those who survived the arduous recruitment process, then came the scene of departure, full of tearful goodbyes at Istanbul’s Sirkeci Train Station (Figure 1.1). Friends, parents, aunts, uncles, spouses, and children all crowded together, reaching over the wooden gates for one last hug and kiss. “We’ll miss you! Send us a color photo from Germany!” they shouted.Footnote 3 Only those from Istanbul enjoyed the luxury of being present on the platform. Others, from all throughout the vast country, had already said their goodbyes. As the train door shut, they strained their necks to look upward at the windows, catching a final glimpse before the departure. Some embarking on the journey waved excitedly back, while others stared wistfully into the distance, wondering if they would soon regret their decision. The stay in Germany was only supposed to last two years, but neither the guest workers nor their loved ones knew when they would be reunited. They hoped that the happy day would come soon.
Figure 1.1 With mixed emotions, family members watch guest workers depart for Germany at Istanbul’s Sirkeci Train Station, 1964.
Migration, as this chapter shows, was not only an individual experience but also a familial and communal one. Guest workers’ departure fundamentally disrupted the lives of the family members, neighbors, and friends they left behind. Economically, it drained village economies of able-bodied young men and women, leading to gendered and generational shifts in the division of labor that created new burdens and opportunities. It was the social destabilization, however, that left the most lasting mark on Turkish attitudes toward the guest worker program. Although parents and spouses often encouraged guest workers to travel abroad, tensions emerged due to conflicts between expectations and reality: whether guest workers were sending enough money home, writing enough letters to their loved ones, or – crucially – returning frequently enough (or at all). As time passed, and as emotional distance grew to match physical distance, the perceived abandonment of the family came to represent the abandonment of the nation.
Not all families shared the same experiences, of course, and the perception of abandoned families changed over time. During the formal recruitment years of 1961 to 1973, most guest workers traveled to West Germany alone, leaving husbands, wives, children, and parents behind. Guest workers’ spouses and children did not begin migrating in large numbers until after the 1973 recruitment stop, strategically navigating West Germany’s lax (though complex) policy of family reunification.Footnote 4 But even during the 1970s, not all families reunified. Some who reunified did not reunify entirely, and others moved back and forth between the two countries as “suitcase children” (Kofferkinder) in a seemingly perpetual state of transience.
Despite efforts to overcome the physical distance, fears of abandonment were inescapable on both sides. Struggling with homesickness and living in isolated factory dormitories, guest workers developed multiple strategies to avoid isolation and maintain contact with home. But letters, phone calls, and even cassette recordings of their voices were not enough, and families struggled to adapt to the absence of a husband, wife, parent, child, or breadwinner. Rumors reverberated in the echo chamber of village chatter, newspapers, films, and folklore. Bombarded with horror stories about male guest workers lavishing themselves in West Germany’s sexually promiscuous culture, wives grew increasingly concerned about their husbands’ whereabouts. They worried that guest workers were running off with blonde German women, and fears of adultery spread. Children left behind in villages with grandparents or shuttled between the two countries became viewed as orphaned and uprooted victims of parental neglect, while those born in Germany, or whose parents brought them there amid the family reunifications of the 1970s, were seen as caught between two cultures, unable to speak the Turkish language, and dressing and behaving like Germans. These concerns, despite emerging within families and local communities in Turkey, spread throughout both countries and became frequent themes in news reports, novels, and films.
In West Germany, guest workers’ family relations and sexualities were crucial to their racialization. Guest workers’ arrival in the 1960s and early 1970s coincided with West Germany’s sexual revolution, a time when concerns about promiscuity, immorality, and the breakup of the family pervaded German public discourse. As Lauren Stokes has shown, Germans condemned the “Mediterranean family,” “Southern family,” and “foreign family” as a backward and oppressive institution that allegedly clashed with West Germany’s self-definition as a liberal democracy.Footnote 5 Guest workers’ sex with German women also dominated headlines, perpetuating stereotypes of violence, patriarchy, and the transgression of national and racial borders. When Turks became the largest ethnic minority in the late 1970s, feminists in the nascent German women’s movement increasingly applied these racializing tropes to the “Turkish family” or “Muslim family” as a litmus test for their inability to integrate.Footnote 6 In both countries, therefore, concerns about the family became enduring tropes in the migrants’ sense of dual estrangement.
Coping with Homesickness
Of all the hardships guest workers faced in Germany, from the backbreaking work in factories and mines to the everyday discrimination by Germans, homesickness and fears of abandonment were among the harshest. Would their parents, husbands, and wives cry every night missing them? Would their young children be able to recognize them upon their return? How would they stay connected to their families at home, and to their homeland as a whole? Where would they get news from Turkey? How could they start new lives without abandoning – or feeling abandoned by – home? To quell these anxieties, guest workers developed numerous strategies – from sending letters, postcards, and photographs, to making friends with other Turks who functioned as surrogate families and support systems, to decorating their bedrooms with Turkish half-moon flags and other nationalist symbols. All worked to ease, but never cure, the pangs of homesickness, and to compress, but never fully close, the growing emotional distance.
These anxieties began even before guest workers set foot in Germany, on the initial train ride.Footnote 7 Not only did the trains lack food, water, and adequate seating (with one West German transportation planner admitting that they were “unacceptable from a humanitarian perspective”), but the idle time also forced guest workers to process their emotions.Footnote 8 The Turkish singer Ferdi Tayfur captured these emotions in his renowned 1977 arabesque ballad “Almanya Treni” (Germany Train). As his train leaves the platform, the singer is overwhelmed with sweet memories of time spent at home with his lover, from whom he will now be separated by thousands of miles. “Do not cry, do not hurt, my rose,” he comforts her, imploring her to remain faithful. “Germany is very far,” he sings. “Do not abandon me. Do not leave me in Germany without a letter.”Footnote 9
One former guest worker, Filiz, explained that the reactions of the women on her train varied based on marital and maternal status. While the younger, single women delighted in imagining the exciting life that awaited them abroad, the wives and mothers of the group appeared “mournful.” One woman “wailed and wept” because she had left her three children behind.Footnote 10 Displays of sadness were so common that one departing woman, Cemile, felt excluded from the collective experience. Assuming that she would cry upon her departure, her brother-in-law had given her a pill that would supposedly subdue her tears. In reality, as she remarked years later, she was not sad at all, because departing her village “freed” her from her despised mother-in-law, who had “oppressed and bullied” her. To bond with her fellow passengers, she performed the expected emotion of sadness by smearing spit into her eye and pretending to cry.Footnote 11
These reactions reflect the wide variance in guest workers’ relationships to their families. A 1964 study reported that 56 percent of all Turkish workers in Germany were married, while a Turkish State Planning Organization report ten years later showed that the number had climbed to 80 percent.Footnote 12 This increase reflected the West German government’s evolving recruitment strategy, which first centered on cities with higher numbers of single young adults but later expanded to rural regions with higher marriage rates.Footnote 13 While some married migrants appreciated the liberation from overbearing in-laws or abusive spouses, they were overall more likely to mourn the distance from their families, especially if they had young children. Single men and women, on the other hand, missed their parents, siblings, and lovers, but tended to be more willing to embrace Germany as an exciting opportunity. For rural women, as sociologist Nermin Abadan-Unat has explained, migration resulted in a “pseudo-emancipation,” offering them the chance to escape gender constraints and develop new power over family spending and decision-making.Footnote 14
But no matter how excited, sorrowful, or bittersweet they felt, homesickness and fears of abandonment loomed large, and employers, organizations, and the West German and Turkish governments sought to ease the difficult transition to life abroad. In 1963, the Workers’ Welfare Organization (Arbeiterwohlfahrt, AWO) in Cologne established a Center for Turkish Workers, nicknamed the “Turkish library,” which featured daily Turkish newspapers and books sent by the Turkish Ministry of Culture. While enjoying Turkish coffee or tea, guest workers could chat about gossip from home, watch Turkish films, and play table tennis in the basement recreation room. Reflecting the importance of the center to the Turkish government, Ambassador Mehmet Baydur presented the workers with a gift emblematic of national pride: a bust of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic. Appreciating the comfort and community, one guest worker who attended the opening called Cologne his “second homeland.”Footnote 15 Yet the Center was exceptional, as cultural venues in most cities and smaller towns were slim to none.
Employers, too, sometimes created spaces to accommodate Turkish workers. The focus was on their Muslim faith, which West Germans considered the most significant marker of cultural difference. Management at the Sterkrade coalmine in Oberhausen, which in the early 1960s employed primarily Turkish workers, boasted that their dining halls never served pork and that their facility featured a prayer room with a rug facing Mecca.Footnote 16 Others came up with creative solutions. The Hanover branch of the German Federal Railways turned two empty train cars into makeshift prayer rooms, which guest workers affectionately called “mobile mosques” or “mosques on wheels.”Footnote 17 As in the case of cultural centers, however, the provision of prayer rooms was a rarity. A 1971 study revealed that only 8 percent of firms with predominantly Turkish workers in the State of North Rhine-Westphalia offered prayer rooms.Footnote 18
Absent designated spaces, guest workers created their own. Local train stations, so characteristic of guest workers’ transient experiences, soon became among their most frequent meeting points. The eleventh platform of the Central Train Station in Munich, where most guest workers had first arrived in Germany, held special nostalgia, with Mahir, one of the earliest Turks to come to Germany, calling it the “gate to the homeland” (Tor zur Heimat).Footnote 19 On their days off each Sunday and on Christian holidays, dozens of usually male Turkish workers congregated in the station’s halls, reading newspapers aloud, catching up on Turkish politics, and sharing advice on how to solve conflicts with German employers (Figure 1.2).Footnote 20 These gatherings, however, made Germans uneasy. Repeating unfounded tropes of Turkish men’s criminality, one German newspaper asked in 1972: “The guest workers in the Munich Central Train Station – are they really so dangerous or do they only look like it?”Footnote 21 With few exceptions, however, guest workers were not engaging in crime and would have preferred to meet elsewhere. But, at a time before the proliferation of Turkish coffee houses opened by guest workers seeking self-sufficiency, train stations were a last resort. Back then, Mahir explained, “We had no other places.”Footnote 22
Figure 1.2 Guest workers read the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet at a train station in Hanover, 1974.
In the private sphere, as Jennifer Miller and Sarah Thomsen Vierra have illuminated, no space was as central to guest workers’ lives as their factory dormitories.Footnote 23 Before the 1973 recruitment stop and rise in family migration, housing guest workers collectively in dormitories was not only an efficient and cost-effective way for firms to keep workers close to their jobs but also a means of social control. These dormitories accommodated mostly Turkish workers but were also home to guest workers from other countries that had signed labor recruitment agreements with the Federal Republic. With all guest workers residing in the same location, factory personnel could monitor their whereabouts and ensure that their focus was, in fact, their work. The carefully crafted dynamics of the dormitories ensured that social interactions typically occurred along gender and national lines. Men and women lived in separate buildings, and workers of the same nationality shared rooms. Those seeking to interact with local Germans or other guest workers of the opposite gender generally had to venture outside their residences. Segregating guest workers in these dormitories had the lasting effect of impeding their social interactions with Germans from the very beginning, serving as evidence of the West German government’s failure to make efforts to integrate them even though Turks were often blamed for failing to integrate.
The ability to forge friendships in factory dormitories depended not only on gender and nationality but also on the cleavages and prejudices of class, rural versus urban origin, and religiosity. Many guest workers of urban origin – especially those who came from middle-class families in Istanbul and other major cities on the geographically western side of Turkey – considered themselves “modern,” “cosmopolitan,” and “European” and found more commonality with Germans than they did the pejoratively named “village Turks” (Dorftürken) from Anatolia.Footnote 24 Muazzez, who worked at the Blaupunkt factory in Hildesheim, summarized these prejudices and the name-calling among the women in her dormitory: the “modern” women were “prostitutes,” and the “traditional,” “religious” women were “stupid bumpkins.”Footnote 25 Photographs from Polaroid cameras – one of the first purchases guest workers made to document their new lives in West Germany – portray these divides. In some photographs, smiling guest workers drink beer, play cards, watch television, listen to music, and sit on bunk beds – all segregated by gender.Footnote 26 One photograph shows cliques of urban-looking women dressed in accordance with the fashion magazines to which they would have had access in Turkish cities, wearing colorful tank tops, miniskirts, and tight jeans.Footnote 27 Another photograph, however, shows several women wearing headscarves and the long skirts typical of the countryside as they sit on the floor, cleaning their shoes and cracking nuts – activities that the German archive housing these photographs tellingly refers to as “village traditions.”Footnote 28
Beyond everyday social interaction, friendships forged in factory dormitories also served as crucial support networks, or surrogate families, which sustained them in times of crisis or uncertainty. Halil, who worked at a cotton mill in Neuhof along with 230 other Turkish men, explained how his friends supported each other both emotionally and financially. They stood in line to visit sick colleagues in the hospital and even pooled their paychecks when one of them urgently needed to travel to Turkey to care for a sick family member. Even in less dire circumstances, such as when a colleague wanted to purchase a house in Turkey or invest in a Turkish company, they handed him some cash and wished him the best of luck.Footnote 29 By the late 1960s, guest workers institutionalized informal meetings between friends and colleagues into cultural, religious, economic, and political immigrant associations.Footnote 30 And by the 1970s, male guest workers in particular began assuming leadership positions in trade unions.
The downside to the formation of new communities along gender, national, and rural–urban lines was that they often spun into a downward spiral of collective commiseration. Necan, a guest worker at the Siemens factory in Berlin, recalled that she and her roommates tended to discuss only Turkey – or, more specifically, only Istanbul, as many urbanites considered their home city representative of the entire country. “We had no other topic,” she explained. “What else could we have talked about? Economics or politics? The entire topic was our homeland.”Footnote 31 The situation was similar for Nuriye, who left her husband behind in 1965 to work at a factory in Bielefeld. “It was terrible being alone in this foreign country,” she recalled. “At the beginning we sat together every evening, listened to Turkish music, and cried.”Footnote 32
With socializing a powerful yet inadequate antidote, guest workers also quelled their homesickness through material objects, decorating their bedroom walls with items that reminded them of home (Figure 1.3).Footnote 33 These objects were often symbols of nationalism, such as Turkish flags, portraits of political figures (including a popular wall tapestry of Atatürk, in full military garb, standing next to the Turkish flag), images of scenic Turkish landscapes and maps, and even magazine covers depicting famous Turkish wrestlers.Footnote 34 Workers from Turkish cities, where cameras were available for purchase, also adorned their walls with photographs of family members or even pets left behind.Footnote 35 Not all decorations, however, were connected to Turkey. Some male workers hung up photographs of scantily clad women cut out from magazines.Footnote 36
Figure 1.3 Ömer displays his bedroom decorations at his factory dormitory in Hanau, 1966. Among them are the Turkish flag, a portrait of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and scenic images of Turkey – all reminders of home.
Of course, staring wistfully at nationalistic decorations on walls and chatting about the homeland with new Turkish friends were no substitute for communication with loved ones at home. Over the years, guest workers developed multiple strategies for keeping in touch with their families. Not only did they fulfill their financial obligations by sending their families substantial portions of their paychecks, but they also regularly sent (and received) letters, postcards, and even cassette recordings of their voices. Yet communication between the two countries was hindered not only by slow postal systems and letters getting lost in the mail but also by guest workers’ and their families’ varying socioeconomic statuses, literacy rates, and rural versus urban origins. The necessity of relying on other guest workers, or other neighbors in villages, as translators or intermediaries made communication between the two countries not only an individual or intrafamilial but also a communal experience. Even if they did not have relatives working in Germany, friends and neighbors in Turkey, too, heard stories – both real and fabricated – about the migrants’ lives and the riches they had earned. These stories shaped perceptions of guest workers in the homeland and tended to encourage future migration.
Sending money home was the most important factor driving guest workers’ individual decisions to migrate, as well as the Turkish government’s decision to send workers abroad. They did so through remittance payments: one-time cash transfers from their bank accounts in West Germany to their relatives’ accounts in Turkey. Guest workers’ families prized remittances not only for the lump sum itself but also for the substantially higher value of the West German Deutschmark compared to the Turkish lira. In 1961, at the start of the guest worker recruitment, the Deutschmark was worth triple the lira and, ten years later, quadruple.Footnote 37 “I get four liras for one mark,” Hasan explained. “If I send 200 marks home, then the family gets 800 liras for it,” he said, adding that he lived frugally and sent his parents in Istanbul 100–150 DM monthly.Footnote 38
Although guest workers were certainly not living luxuriously, the notion that they had “pockets full of Deutschmarks” shaped Turkish perceptions of them. Family members’ expectations of receiving remittances were no secret. Özgür, the father of a guest worker, repeatedly sent letters from the Turkish coal-mining town Zonguldak to his German daughter-in-law, Charlotte, in Cologne, inquiring about his son’s finances behind his back. “It has been three years since Metin went to Germany,” he wrote in 1964. “Since then, those who went to Germany from Turkey have made big money. How much money does Metin have in the bank now?”Footnote 39 When Charlotte complained about Metin’s excessive spending habits, Özgür suggested that the couple move back to Zonguldak and live with him. Grossly exaggerating the exchange rate, he noted that Deutschmarks were worth twenty-five to thirty lira. “You would not need to pay rent, a kilogram of water costs six lira, and vegetables and fruits are inexpensive.”Footnote 40
As the case of Özgür, Metin, and Charlotte reveals, the other most important forms of communication between the two countries were letters, postcards, and packages. Like the migrants themselves, correspondence from parents, spouses, and children journeyed from Turkey to Germany – but, unlike the guest workers’ three-day train ride, could often take weeks, if not months, to arrive. After waiting seemingly interminably for a response, receiving a letter was such a cause for excitement that guest workers regularly photographed themselves sitting in their dormitory rooms reading mail. In one photograph, Filiz lies on her bed with a pen and paper in hand, likely responding to one of the many postcards she received from her friends and family in Istanbul, which tended to feature landscapes of the city’s most beloved tourist sites, such as the Bosphorus Bridge, the Emirgan Forest, and the neighborhood of Eminönü.Footnote 41 In another, a male guest worker sits at a small side table covered in an embroidered tablecloth (presumably brought from the home country) and opens a letter, while one of his roommates stands beside him, eager to hear any news from home.Footnote 42
In their handwritten letters home, guest workers described their living situations – the good and the bad – and expressed somber emotions of longing and homesickness. In the winter of 1966, a young married couple named Hatice and Zoltan wrote to Zoltan’s parents, airing their grievances. Although they lived on their own rather than in a factory dormitory, their apartment was cramped and cold, and long work hours and minimal contact with locals left them struggling to learn German.Footnote 43 “Despite having seen you four months ago, I miss you now more than ever before,” Zoltan confessed. “I am homesick.”Footnote 44 The couple’s letters also reveal that guest workers’ family members often sent packages in the mail. Hatice asked his parents to send him some wool gloves, long underwear, and cotton briefs from Çift Kaplan, a popular store headquartered in Istanbul. “It is quite cold here,” Hatice wrote, and “things made of cotton are expensive here,” alluding to Turkey’s postwar role as a major exporter of cotton.Footnote 45 Yet packages also carried symbolic meaning. Relics of their homeland, the objects sent in packages were physically touched by Turkish textile workers, purchased at favorite Turkish stores, and packed by their loved ones.
The ability to send letters, however, depended on rural–urban origin, socioeconomic status, and education level. Communicating in writing was the privilege of a few, largely confined to individuals from urban centers or the highest echelons of rural societies. Having grown up and been educated in Istanbul, Hatice and Zoltan wrote well, with the exception of minor grammatical errors. By contrast, guest workers of rural origin left fewer letters in the archives because they and their family members were more likely to be illiterate. When reading letters or newspapers in factory dormitories, guest workers from rural regions regularly relied on social networks, asking their urban counterparts to read and write their letters. Literate neighbors and friends in villages – typically men – performed this act of translation at home.Footnote 46 The communal experience of letter writing meant that knowledge of guest workers’ lives in Germany spread broadly throughout home communities, even among those who did not have relatives abroad.
Telephone communication, too, reflected both Turkey’s rural–urban divide and the communal experience of circulating knowledge about guest workers. In the formal recruitment years of the 1960s and early 1970s, telephone connections were not yet installed in most rural regions of Turkey. But even in large cities, not everyone owned a telephone, and even for those who did, expensive international fees made phone calls to West Germany a rarity, often reserved for special occasions such as birthdays.Footnote 47 Owning a telephone thus imbued a family with not only social status but also a newfound responsibility to serve as an intermediary between guest workers in Germany and their families at home. Fatma, whose family came from a small village near Trabzon, recalled this frequent experience in the 1980s: “Individuals from neighboring villages – or the relatives of those in Germany – would call us and say, ‘We would like to talk to so and so. Is he there?’ And then we set the phone down, ran over, and shouted, ‘Telephone for you!’ and they came over to our house and spoke on the phone, of course.”Footnote 48
To bypass the complications of telephone calls, guest workers and their loved ones at home developed another strategy: sending audio recordings of their voices.Footnote 49 The mechanism was the creative repurposing of battery-operated cassette players, a new technology that guest workers frequently purchased in Germany to listen to Turkish music. The process was complex. After recording their voice messages on a blank tape, the senders located fellow guest workers who were planning to travel home to a neighboring city or village and who would be willing to transport the cassette player, along with some extra blank tapes, to the recipients. After listening to the voice message, the recipients would then record their own responses on the blank tapes and send the cassette player back to Germany through the same or another liaison. As with letters and telephone calls, social networks were crucial to carrying out this process. The Sunday meetings at the train stations, for example, were spaces where cassette players exchanged hands.
Not all guest workers, however, conveyed truthful accounts. Instead, they sometimes performed emotions that they believed were expected of them. Filiz and her long-term best friend Necan admitted that they had staged the happy photographs they had sent to Filiz’s parents in Istanbul. Upon first glance, the photographs show exciting lives filled with music, parties, and window shopping through the streets of West Berlin.Footnote 50 Although they truly enjoyed these experiences, the two women deliberately downplayed their malaise and exhaustion from hard work. To avoid worrying Filiz’s parents, they dressed up in fancy clothing, made their room look nicer than it was – “We even purchased flowers!” – and smiled extra widely.Footnote 51 The staging of these photographs calls into question the veracity of the stories guest workers told to loved ones at home. Other guest workers, too, may have fabricated or exaggerated their quality of life, as well as the wealth they acquired in Germany, to offer reassuring accounts of their happiness and success.
Despite possible fabrications, those in the home country – whether family members, neighbors, friends, or community members – generally took guest workers’ stories at face value and saw within them a glimmer of hope for themselves to forge a better life.Footnote 52 These stories thus served as a pull factor that convinced others to work in Germany via chain migration.Footnote 53 One guest worker named Osman, for example, attributed his migration decision to his uncle, who wrote letters from Germany boasting that “he was full of meat and vegetables every day.”Footnote 54 Osman’s uncle then “invited” him to come to Germany by securing a work permit for him not through the formal channel of the governmental recruitment program, but rather through his employer – a common practice at the time for circumventing the bureaucracy, the seemingly interminable waiting period, and humiliating medical examinations at the official recruitment offices.
Above all, the best antidote to homesickness was the ability to have one’s family in Germany (Figure 1.4). By 1968, already 58 percent of married male guest workers of all nationalities had brought their wives to Germany, typically within one year of their departure. By 1971, over half of the guest workers had brought at least one of their children to Germany. These numbers increased markedly throughout the 1970s upon the surge in family migration, and by 1980 over 90 percent of guest workers moved out of their factory dormitories and into their own apartments.Footnote 55 But eliminating physical distance did not mean that emotional distance disappeared. No amount of money, letters, postcards, or voice recordings could substitute for the absence of a loved one, and even the happiest of reunions after years apart were often tinged with remorse.
Figure 1.4 Members of the Dağdeviren family, who were able to migrate through West Germany’s family reunification policy, smile from their apartment window in Munich, 1969.
Adulterous Husbands and Scorned Wives
Although guest workers generally endeavored to maintain close communication with Turkey, long distances and a slow postal system left many families worrying about the workers’ fates. Nightmare scenarios played out in their heads, fueled by rumors and stereotypes about the unscrupulous behaviors to which guest workers might adapt in a West German society that villagers often imagined as promiscuous and immoral. Sexually charged, gendered, and racialized, these rumors were grounded in true, yet isolated, cases of male workers cheating on their wives with busty, blonde German women – or worse, abandoning their wives and children entirely. These rumors were not confined to men. The imagined sexual proclivities of female guest workers, who were living in Germany alone and were no longer bound to the watchful eye of traditional family structures, became the focus of concern as well. By the mid-1970s, the trope of the sexually promiscuous – or worse, adulterous – guest worker had reached urban milieus and had crystallized into music, film, literature, and other forms of popular culture. By transgressing both family and nation and fueling feelings of abandonment, sex between Turks and Germans was one of the earliest indications that Turks had purportedly “Germanized” and lost their Turkish identity
Even before guest worker migration to Germany, Turkish villagers already associated migration with the vices of urban life. From the 1930s to the 1950s, millions of villagers migrated as seasonal workers to Turkish cities, particularly to Istanbul’s notorious shantytowns (gecekondu), and returned with shocking tales of corruption and sexual depravity.Footnote 56 The perceived immorality of cities threatened the stability of rural gender relations and family life, which were already in flux. Since the 1923 founding of the Turkish Republic under Atatürk, Turkish policymakers had embarked upon a mission to secularize, “modernize,” and “civilize” the countryside, in part by promoting greater autonomy for rural women, whom urbanites viewed as submissive victims of Islamic law.Footnote 57 While these reforms succeeded in improving women’s legal position in relation to their husbands (particularly regarding divorce), customary family structures remained largely in place.Footnote 58 Once women reached adulthood and marriage, they typically wore headscarves, long skirts, and long-sleeved shirts – a far cry from the miniskirts, spaghetti straps, and high heels popular in both German and Turkish cities at the time. Premarital sex, adultery, and promiscuity were serious taboos, and rumors about deviance often spread like wildfire.
More so than internal migration from the Turkish countryside to cities, migration abroad to West Germany posed a special threat to gender and sexual norms. Despite Germany’s own rural–urban divides, Turkish villagers imagined the country (and Western Europe as a whole) as a monolithic urban space – made more fearsome due to religious differences. Villagers feared that guest workers would eat pork, worship in Christian churches, have extramarital sex, and turn into gâvur, the derogatory Turkish word for non-Muslims, which implied that one was an infidel or traitor to the faith.Footnote 59 These concerns were decidedly gendered. Men might eagerly indulge in the seedy yet tantalizing offerings of the underbelly of German cities, such as bars, brothels, prostitution, and late-night hookups.Footnote 60 Women wandering alone and unprotected in German cities might provoke unwanted sexual attention. “As soon as you get off the train, German men will kiss you!” one woman was warned.Footnote 61 “Thank God!” she recalled years later, “No one kissed us, and no one tried to make a pass at us.” So, too, were these discourses overwhelmingly heteronormative. Sources testifying to homosexuality among guest workers in the early 1960s, particularly those produced by guest workers themselves or those in their home country, are comparably scant – reflective largely of the stigmatization and silences surrounding homosexuality at the time.Footnote 62
Although villagers’ concerns predated guest worker migration, they were amplified amid vast transformations in gender and sexuality within West Germany itself. Germany’s loss in 1945 represented a national emasculation, whereby German men – prized for their strength and vigor during the Third Reich – experienced a collective crisis of masculinity.Footnote 63 Moreover, in 1961, the same year that Turkish guest workers first began arriving in Germany, the contraceptive pill burst onto German markets, giving women newfound control over their bodies and reproductive choices and ushering in the sexual revolution, second-wave feminism, and gay liberation movements.Footnote 64 Despite this transformation of sexuality in the public sphere, the 1950s conservative emphasis on the stability of the family did not disappear, and many Germans, particularly the aging postwar generation, associated promiscuity and pornography with the moral corruption of youth and, by proxy, of the nation.Footnote 65 Contestations over gender and sexuality impacted Germans’ and Turks’ attitudes about each other, becoming a litmus test for cultural compatibility. By the late 1970s, as Rita Chin has shown, white mainstream West German feminists committed to the emancipatory potential of sexuality inadvertently fueled racism by decrying Turkish and Muslim gender relations as “backward,” “patriarchal,” and incompatible with a post-fascist and Cold War society that defined itself as liberal, democratic, and free.Footnote 66 Moreover, German women’s decisions to have sex with Turkish men rather than (or in addition to) German men enflamed preexisting tensions about “race-mixing” (Rassenschande) and contributed to German men’s crisis of masculinity.Footnote 67
Sex across borders had a racialized component (Figure 1.5). German women’s blonde hair and blue eyes were repeatedly mentioned in Turkish newspapers, folklore, and films from the 1960s through the 1980s, while Germans reiterated Orientalist tropes by racializing migrants from the Mediterranean and the Middle East as “dark-skinned” and “exotic.” Even in the 1980s, West German feminists invoked this racialized view as they struggled to wrap their heads around what they perceived as the curious phenomenon of sex across borders. “Why do Arab men love blonde women and German men love black women? Is it the exoticism, the dark skin, the erotic voice, the swaying gait, or are they simply more charming, natural, sensual, more of a man, more of a woman? Is it the other language, the simultaneously different emotions or caresses that hide within them?” Perhaps, they wondered, the “search for the unknown” was a projection of one’s inner psychological struggles – “an attempt to break through one’s own cultural limitations or imaginative horizon, to intellectually and emotionally conquer something new for oneself?”Footnote 68
Figure 1.5 Male guest workers walk past a blonde German woman with a short skirt upon their arrival in Dortmund, 1964.
Beyond the transnational discourses, concerns about sex were central to guest workers’ everyday lives. Alongside homesickness and isolation, male guest workers often complained about sexual malaise, with one man calling himself “psychologically ill” due to the lack of physical and emotional intimacy.Footnote 69 Another young guest worker was so starved for sex that he admitted having to restrain himself from touching a German woman on a streetcar, confessing that she was so “beautiful” and “free” and “smell[ed] so good.”Footnote 70 Married guest workers were further constrained by their vows, as well as Turkish law, which expressly forbid adultery. Not until the rise of family reunification in the 1970s, when guest workers increasingly brought their spouses to Germany, could they have sex within marriage on a regular basis. If a guest worker alone in Germany wished to have sex with their spouse, they would have to wait until they traveled back to Turkey on vacation, which usually took place just once per year. In 1975, a Turkish midwife in the small village of Çalapverdi explained that the ability to have sex only during their summer vacations drastically impacted birthrates in guest workers’ home villages: while the village typically had only one or two births per months, about thirty women expected babies during the month of March, which was precisely nine months after vacationing guest workers returned to the village in July.Footnote 71
For single guest workers, the lack of sexual gratification owed in many respects to employers’ restrictions on their private lives. As dormitory personnel restricted visitors, especially overnight guests, guest workers seeking satisfaction needed to leave their dormitories.Footnote 72 Female guest workers recalled that their male counterparts often waited outside their dormitories, hoping to take them out on dates.Footnote 73 Frequently, groups of male guest workers also went out on the town to meet German women at bars. Certainly, not all guest workers were interested in German women. Searching for love, a thirty-three-year-old car mechanic who had been living in West Berlin for three years placed a personal advertisement in Anadolu Gazetesi, a newspaper produced by the Turkish government for guest workers: “I have not warmed up to German girls. I prefer Turkish girls,” he wrote, describing himself as 1.7 meters tall, 72 kilograms, with auburn hair, hazel eyes, and even his own apartment (a rarity for a guest worker at the time).Footnote 74 But to his dismay, his dating pool, so to speak, was limited, as male guest workers far outnumbered female guest workers.
Largely due to the racialization of Turks, male guest workers’ attempts to meet German women, either for one-time sexual encounters or long-term romance, often proved frustrating. One guest worker insisted that German women “run after the Italians and Spaniards, and even the Greeks, but … say that they are afraid of us Turks” and “do not want anything to do with us.”Footnote 75 The popular Turkish folkloric singer Ankaralı Turgut captured this frustration in his hit song “Alman Kızları” (German Girls), in which the narrator fantasizes about young German women with “blonde hair” who go out to bars to “chase love” with “handsome young men.” “Turks cannot live without you German girls,” he admits, but laments that they “do not like migrants because they are Turkish.”Footnote 76
German women’s distaste for Turkish men stemmed partly from the sensationalist media coverage of guest workers’ criminality and sexual violence.Footnote 77 As early as the 1960s, German media warned against the wildly tempting “Mediterranean temperament” of dark-skinned, dark-haired men – a racialized category that included not only Turkish but also Italian, Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, and Moroccan guest workers – which allegedly made them prone to violating defenseless German women.Footnote 78 A Hamburg news report on a Turkish guest worker who had strangled his German wife included a remark from a male neighbor, who boasted, “If Helga were mine, she would still be alive.”Footnote 79 Concerns about Turkish men as hypermasculine, virile, and dangerous also regurgitated centuries-long Orientalist tropes about polygamous orgies in the harems of the Ottoman Empire. The same newspaper denounced a Turkish man for entering a local bar with eight headscarf-clad belly dancers and threatening the German owner. Although the real threat was the owner – who had drunk “at least thirty whiskeys” and pulled out a pistol from behind the bar – the newspaper blamed “the Mohammedan,” or “the man from the Orient.”Footnote 80
When a German woman did accept a guest worker’s invitation for a night out on the town, the awkwardness of the first date was often compounded by racist prejudices and logistical issues. Osman Gürlük recounted a horrible series of dates he had with a seventeen-year-old German girl soon after arriving in Dortmund to work as a railroad constructor.Footnote 81 Osman was nervous for the date even before he arrived, since he had no car and “German girls are not interested in men without cars.” But the real problems started as soon as they arrived at the movie theater for their first date, when the girl began disparaging his minimal German language skills. After a few dates, when the girl invited him home, her parents made it clear that “they did not want a Turk.” Unable to have sex at her parents’ house because the girl worried that she would moan too loudly, they were left with limited options. Osman did not have the privacy of a car, and sneaking her into his factory dormitory would have been too risky, since the dormitory personnel were always keeping watch – not to mention that he slept in a bunkbed with multiple other guest workers in the room. After searching around the city for a dark alley, the couple finally had sex – but the relationship ended soon thereafter.
Confirming the fears that circulated throughout Turkish villages, male guest workers sometimes did in fact resort to brothels. The Italian author and literary scholar Gino Chiellino, who lived in Germany and studied migrants’ experiences, expressed guest workers’ mixed feelings about cheating on their wives with prostitutes in a poem aptly titled “Loyalty.”Footnote 82 Yearning sexually for his wife thousands of kilometers away, the poem’s narrator visits a prostitute. He justifies this “dangerous breaking of the vow” by envisioning his wife cheating on him as well. Surely, he wonders, his wife must also feel “horny” (geil), as men in the village gaze at her licentiously during his absence. Having sex with random German women, however, could also lead to troubling encounters. Rumors circulated about unscrupulous German women who got guest workers drunk and stole their money. In one retelling of this tragic fate, a Turkish guest worker picked up a German woman at a bar and took her to a hotel. When he awoke with a hangover despite only drinking two glasses of schnapps, all his money was missing. “We made fun of him,” one of his colleagues recalled. “He was furious at the German girl, and he told us they were all trash.”Footnote 83
Amid the Cold War context, as Jennifer Miller has revealed, male Turkish guest workers also crossed the border into East Germany to meet, have sex with, and even marry East German women.Footnote 84 These intimate relationships across the inter-German border represented a paradox: while West Germans viewed Turks as “eastern,” East Germans viewed them as representatives of the “West.” One Turkish man recalled that East German women dancing in nightclubs viewed Turks as sexually virile and were easily tantalized by the gifts they brought from West Berlin. These relationships, however, brought Turks under state surveillance, as the East German secret police (Stasi) suspected that they were Western spies attempting to subvert the state.Footnote 85
Popular culture in both West Germany and Turkey captured anxieties about sex across borders. In German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s acclaimed 1974 film Angst essen Seele auf (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul), a German widow is ostracized, and even called a “whore” by her grown children, for falling in love with a dashing young Moroccan guest worker. The Turkish film Almanyalı Yarim (My German Lover), released the same year, tells a similarly tragic story of a Turkish guest worker and a wealthy blonde German woman named Maria (portrayed by a Turkish actress), who infuriates her father – a former German military officer during World War II – by moving to Turkey, converting to Islam, and changing her name to the Turkish “Meral.” Like Fassbinder’s, this film uses the trope of female victimization to critique anti-Turkish racism in Germany and – through the father’s portrayal as an unrepentant Nazi – exposes the persistence of racialized thinking well after the fall of Nazism.
Though exaggerated in films, German women did face prejudices for engaging in relationships, and marriages, with Turkish men. In 1972, the Association for German Women Married to Foreigners (Interessengemeinschaft der mit Ausländern verheirateten Frauen, IAF) was formed to fight against their social and legal discrimination. Although the organization was originally founded by educated women married to foreign students, it expanded to include women married to guest workers. On an everyday level, the organization provided a forum for German women to raise consciousness, share their stories, and feel solidarity.Footnote 86 Within ten years, the IAF grew its membership to 28,000, became affiliated with the United Nations and the European Economic Community, and established partnerships with cities throughout the world. Yet the IAF, like many white feminist organizations at the time, was not immune from criticism for inadvertently perpetuating racism. Men affiliated with the IAF complained that the women were seeking to transform their “exotic” husbands into “regular German” men, and when the IAF finally began rallying on behalf of migrant women, their emphasis on migrant women’s victimization at the hands of their excessively patriarchal husbands reinforced racialized stereotypes about the dangerous male foreigners.Footnote 87
The West German government, too, worried about binational relationships. Some foreigners, especially following the 1973 moratorium on guest worker recruitment, engaged in fake marriages (Scheinehen) with German women to secure work and residency permits. In the late 1970s, the West German government threatened to deport a man who had divorced his Turkish wife, married a German woman to secure residency status, divorced the German wife, and married another Turkish woman.Footnote 88 Following Turkey’s September 12, 1980, military coup, fake marriages became entangled with concerns about fake asylum seekers (Scheinasylanten). The state government of West Berlin, for example, blamed the surprising tripling of Turkish-German marriages on the asylum crisis, which officials in turn attributed to underground fake marriage syndicates. Officials were particularly alarmed by an outlying case in which an eighteen-year-old Turkish man married an eighty-two-year-old German woman.Footnote 89
In Turkey, reactions to sex and marriage across borders were likewise complex. Some Turkish parents were delighted to know that their sons had found love abroad. Such was the case with Charlotte and Metin, whose father, Özgür, regularly inquired about his finances. When Metin wrote to his parents in Zonguldak informing them of his intention to marry Charlotte, Özgür gave the couple his enthusiastic blessing in a letter addressed directly to Charlotte.Footnote 90 “Our son is single,” Özgür wrote. “We would like [him] to marry a good German girl,” and “You bring our son much happiness.” Özgür implored the couple to “get engaged in Germany, but marry in TURKEY,” writing in capital letters for emphasis. By signing the letter with “best wishes from us, your parents,” he welcomed Charlotte into the family even before the couple’s engagement.Footnote 91
Unlike West German news outlets, Turkish newspapers of the 1960s often portrayed binational marriages positively, using them to espouse nationalist narratives in which “young and beautiful” German girls cherished their Muslim Turkish husbands.Footnote 92 Yet within Turkish media discourse, wives’ conversion to Islam was crucial.Footnote 93 During the 1960s, Milliyet published countless two-sentence reports often headlined “A German Woman Has Become a Muslim” that specified the woman’s age, maiden name, and new surname.Footnote 94 Entire columns were devoted to especially intriguing cases. In 1964, a German woman was allegedly thrown out of the Catholic Church for her decision to marry her Muslim boyfriend, and the couple encountered difficulty finding a mosque and imam willing to perform their engagement ceremony until she converted to Islam and expressed her excitement for reading a German translation of the Koran.Footnote 95 By enthusiastically embracing Islam, German women could defy national boundaries and say with pride: “Now I, too, am a Turk.”Footnote 96 The possibility that German women might be included in the Turkish national community, at least as implied in the Turkish urban press of the 1960s, stood in stark contrast to Germans’ overwhelmingly racist hostility toward Turkish-German marriages.
The reception of sex across borders differed entirely, however, when it involved the adulterous affairs of guest workers who were already married. Adultery was by far the most pernicious threat involving guest workers’ sexuality and, while overwhelmingly fabricated, rumors circulated widely. A woman from Bolu who later joined her husband in Hanover summarized the wives’ “anxious and uneasy feelings” upon their husbands’ departure: “We heard rumors that Turkish men would marry other wives here, without being divorced.”Footnote 97 To a certain extent, these rumors were true. Lamenting his sexual frustration in the factory dormitory, one man estimated (likely an exaggeration) that 60 percent of his fellow guest workers cheated on their wives.Footnote 98 Frequent reports in Turkish newspapers in the 1960s supported these fears: a Munich judge had “permitted a harem” by allowing a guest worker to legally marry a German woman without divorcing the Turkish wife that he left behind; another migrant had married a German woman and left his four children at home.Footnote 99 In such cases, many abandoned wives in the countryside lived as “married widows,” perpetually mourning the loss of their husbands and enduring ostracization.Footnote 100
In rare situations, adulterous male guest workers brought their new German wives back to their Turkish villages, even though Turkey had criminalized polygamy fifty years prior. A West German magazine reported on the disturbing case of Ali Yalçın who had returned to his Turkish wife and children with his new “blonde wife,” Erika, in tow.Footnote 101 Immediately upon arriving, Erika laid down in their marital bed and demanded that Ali’s Turkish wife serve her breakfast. The drama lasted only several days, however, until Erika realized that Ali had blatantly lied to her about the village’s amenities. Furious that the village had neither electricity nor a hair salon, Erika stormed out of the house and traveled back to Germany, leaving Ali with a broken heart.
In at least one case, adultery occurred across the Iron Curtain. In 1980, a Turkish guest worker living in West Berlin appealed directly to West German Prime Minister Willy Brandt for help in a tricky situation. Two years before, he had divorced his wife in Turkey and – with the permission of East German authorities – married an East German woman. The marriage ceremony, which took place in Turkey, went smoothly, until the man reentered West German borders with his East German wife. Suspecting him of being an East German spy, the West German police came knocking on his door, searched through his bag, and interrogated him. Fearing imprisonment, the man spent a year hiding at a friend’s house in Duisburg and was planning to relocate to a new hideout in Frankfurt. Whether or not the man was one of the Stasi’s up to 189,000 “unofficial collaborators” (inoffizielle Mitarbeiter) is unknown, for the archival trail ends there. The staffer responsible for opening the prime minister’s mail apparently rerouted it to the headquarters of the Workers’ Welfare Organization in Cologne, where it sat in a box for decades before being donated to Germany’s migration museum.Footnote 102
Though usually directed at men, Turkish anxieties about adultery were also staged on women’s bodies.Footnote 103 One female guest worker from Kastamonu was warned that she might “forget” her husband. “You’ll have a man on every finger of your hand,” her husband’s uncle told her, and “you’ll divorce your husband.” She later interpreted these concerns as rooted in her fellow villagers’ “stupid” fear that women would cheat on their husbands if they worked outside the home. “I went [to Germany] nonetheless and proved them wrong,” she boasted.Footnote 104 Concerns also abounded about the infidelity of guest workers’ wives who remained in Turkey. One male villager warned that “rather than having sex in Germany,” a guest worker must “respect his wife and think about her pleasure,” otherwise “the time will come when she sleeps with another man.”Footnote 105 Such cases, while generally less common, did exist. In 1966, Cumhuriyet reported that the mother of a guest worker had stalked her daughter-in-law and caught her “red-handed” cohabitating with another man. After being found guilty of adultery – a crime under Turkish law until 1996 – the young woman violently attacked her mother-in-law outside of Istanbul’s Criminal Court.Footnote 106
Suspicious of their wives’ infidelity, male guest workers often placed them under the watchful eye of relatives. This practice was far more common in Turkish villages, where migration’s destabilizing effect on family structures was especially pronounced. In the village of Boğazlıyan, 56 percent of wives left behind lived alone with their children, whereas 29 percent lived with members of their husbands’ families.Footnote 107 The mother-in-law of one twenty-one-year-old woman slept by her side every night during her husband’s absence and, in another case, a fourteen-year-old brother-in-law kept watch.Footnote 108 While guest workers justified this supervision as crucial to “protecting” their wives against the dangers of living alone and the unwanted advances of other men, many women felt that their freedom was being constrained. Fatma, whose father departed for Germany in 1972, explained that her mother was forced to spend a year living with her “very hierarchal” in-laws, where she feared contradicting their authority and was “not allowed” to eat at their table. Estranged from her own parents due to their disapproval of her “poorer” husband, Fatma’s mother’s only solace was the comfort of female friends, several of whom were in similar situations.Footnote 109
However unfounded, the hot topic of guest workers’ adultery circulated throughout Turkish popular culture during the 1970s – from folkloric village songs to novels and films produced in cities. In one popular song, “Almanya Dönüşü” (Return from Germany), a wife is furious when her husband appears at her doorstep after having cheated on her with a blonde German “slut.”Footnote 110 To make matters worse, he had broken his promise to send her money: “Where are those bundles of money you used to dream about? Where is that multi-storied home? Where are those cars?” Likewise, in the iconic Black Sea region folksong “Almanya Acı Vatan” (Germany, Bitter Homeland), a wife condemns her husband for remarrying in Germany, failing to return after five years, and not sending a single letter. “What good is this money?” the singer asks. “Your family with five children, all of them miss you … You have made your home worse. Worse thanks to you.”Footnote 111 This ballad became so ingrained in Turkish culture that director Şerif Gören chose Almanya Acı Vatan as the title of his 1979 feature film, whose poster depicts a mustachioed guest worker surrounded by two beautiful blonde women drinking beer.Footnote 112
These themes appear in other Turkish films of the time.Footnote 113 In Türkân Şoray’s 1972 film Dönüş (The Return), a woman named Gülcan learns to read and write for the sole purpose of sending her husband letters, but he never responds, and a prominent elderly villager sexually assaults her. When her husband finally returns, he brings a German wife and baby, whom Gülcan must care for after he dies in an accident.Footnote 114 Released just two years later, Orhan Elmas’s 1974 film El Kapısı (Foreign Door) centers on a female guest worker named Elvan who takes off her headscarf, wears sleeveless dresses, sings in a nightclub, and engages in sex work. After rumors circulate in her home village, her husband travels to Munich and fatally stabs her to protect his honor. The portrayal of both Gülcan and Elvan as victims of their husbands further reflects the importance of Turkey’s rural–urban divide: produced in cities, the films’ critique of gender relations in the countryside substantially overlaps with West Germans’ stereotypes about Turkish “village culture” that were instrumentalized to foster racism and tropes of cultural incompatibility.
The widespread reach of these tragic songs and films likely influenced Gülten Dayıoğlu’s 1975 book of short stories Geride Kalanlar (Those Who Stayed Behind). The cover art, which depicts five somber village women, sets the tone visually. In the book’s opening vignette, a thirty-year-old woman travels to a city to visit a doctor but has difficulties articulating why she feels unwell. When the doctor asks whether she is married, she responds with an ambiguous “Eh.” She has a husband, she says, but she has not seen him for seven years. Although she is comforted by the knowledge that German women have little fondness for “men with black hair, black eyes, and black mustaches,” she has heard rumors that her husband has remarried and conceived a son with a woman with “blonde hair” and “sky-blue eyes.” At first denying the accusation, the husband spreads rumors that she is “crazy,” making her question her own sanity.Footnote 115
Although some adulterous husbands returned to Turkey after steamy affairs abroad, the subject largely remained an unknown, or a deliberately repressed, taboo within families. Even fifty years after the incident, Yaşar hesitated to answer questions about his adultery, while his neighbors eagerly gossiped about the scandal.Footnote 116 Nowhere are the enduring emotional scars clearer, however, than in Marcus Attila Vetter’s 2006 autobiographical documentary film Mein Vater, der Türke (My Father, the Turk), which traces Vetter’s journey from Germany to a small Anatolian village to meet his biological father, who had abandoned his German mother upon hearing of the pregnancy.Footnote 117 When Vetter meets his long-lost family, including his half-siblings and his father’s Turkish wife, a tearful reunion ensues. The documentary won Europe-wide acclaim and the award for best long-form documentary at the 2007 San Francisco International Film Festival. The festival’s website puts it best: Vetter’s story, representative of so many other guest worker families, shows “how one man’s actions changed the course of an entire family” and unearths “more than thirty years of pent-up feelings and questions.”Footnote 118
Children as Victims and Threats
The other core component of the breakup and abandonment of the family was the situation of guest worker children (Gastarbeiterkinder), whom Turks and Germans alike viewed as both victims and threats. The perception of guest worker children as a threat was particularly pronounced in Germany, fueling racist tropes that emphasized Turks’ inability to “integrate” into German society. The opposite threat, however, prevailed in Turkey: excessive integration. Turks in the homeland denigrated guest worker children, even more so than their parents, for having undergone a process of Germanization whereby they adopted German mannerisms and fashions, had premarital sex, lost their Muslim faith, and – most egregiously – spoke German better than Turkish. The very possibility that Turks, and particularly Turkish children, could become culturally German was vital: not only did it contradict German discourses about migrants’ failed integration, but it also exposed the fluidity of Germany’s rigid blood-based identity.
The experiences of guest workers’ children varied greatly and changed over time – so much so that it is impossible to speak about a singular “second generation.” Especially amid the family migration of the 1970s, many children were born or raised primarily in Germany (Figure 1.6). Yet the overwhelming emphasis on children on German soil obscures the reality that many children remained in Turkey and never set foot in Germany, while up to 700,000 others – colloquially called “suitcase children” (Kofferkinder) – regularly traveled back and forth. Reflecting the broader destabilization of family life, children left behind in Turkey lived with a single parent (usually their mothers) or, in cases when both parents worked abroad, with grandparents and other relatives. The perception that these children were victims or “orphans” who suffered because of their parents’ abandonment or repeated uprooting fed into exclusionary tropes in both countries that blamed guest workers for the breakup of family life. Yet victimization tropes did not reflect the reality of all children left behind, as many found advantages, and even power, in their situations.Footnote 119
Figure 1.6 Turkish children outside a West German elementary school in Duisburg-Hamborn.
In Turkey, children left behind were often victimized as “orphans” who were emotionally distressed and poorly raised. This depiction was especially true in cases of absent fathers in villages, who typically, due to gendered social conventions, were the primary breadwinners, had been granted more extensive education than their wives, and handled disciplinary matters within the family. One teacher in a Turkish village worried about the fifty “half-orphans” in his classroom being raised by mothers and grandmothers who could “not even write their own names.” These children, many of whom apparently also lacked discipline and diligence, “pay for the economic survival of their families with their own futures.”Footnote 120 While this denigration of female caretakers reinforced gendered tropes about male supremacy in the household, it also reflected many mothers’ real struggles during their husbands’ absences. In Nermin Abadan-Unat’s 1976 study of 373 wives left behind in the province of Boğazlıyan, nearly half reported that they assumed greater responsibility for tasks otherwise completed by men, such as shopping for major purchases, borrowing money, and collecting debts, and one quarter expressed difficulties “establishing authority and discipline.”Footnote 121
For many children left behind, being separated from their parents was a painful experience. When she was just in the fifth grade, Alev Demir wrote a series of poems capturing this sense of estrangement. In a poem called “Yearning,” she lamented: “I am distant from my mother and father. I do not know what to do because I am alone. I cannot laugh. I cannot cry. I do not like yearning.”Footnote 122 Similarly powerful is Murat Çobanoğlu’s popular 1970s folksong “Oğulun Babaya Mektubu” (A Son’s Letter to His Father), in which a teenage son condemns his “cruel” father for breaking his promise to “return quickly” and having become “attached” to Germany. Eleven years have passed, and the family’s situation has become “terrible”: their house is “in ruins,” they cannot afford to eat warm food, and their neighbors have “stigmatized” and “turned against” them. Although the son has assumed his father’s caretaker role, he will soon leave for military service and will be unable to provide for the family. In a subsequent song, the father admits to crying upon reading the letter and, again, promises that he will return – but he never does.Footnote 123
Some children, however, recalled the shift in family relations fondly. Yusuf K. from the village of Buldan described the absence of “fatherly authority” as a “nice time.” His mother was not as “strict or authoritarian,” and she let him play outside for hours without a curfew. Whereas he found it difficult to bond emotionally with his father, “I could tell my mother all my desires without being embarrassed.”Footnote 124 In cases of the extended absence of mothers and fathers, some children felt even more comfortable with their surrogate parents. “I considered my grandmother my actual mother,” Ebru T. explained, noting that, despite her parents visiting her village of Eskişehir only once per year, she did not miss them. When her parents finally brought her to Germany at age eight, she found it difficult to relate to them. To her, they were “foreign people” who barely existed.Footnote 125 Reiterating the notion of parents becoming “foreign,” another child happily recalled that her grandparents “treated me like a queen” and “gave me everything I wanted,” and that she was “ambivalent” about her parents.Footnote 126 Saddened by this estrangement, some parents regretted their decisions to leave their children behind, with one admitting that she was not a “good mother.”Footnote 127
But not all children left behind stayed in Turkey permanently. Especially central to transnational tropes of victimization were the “suitcase children,” a term that evoked their never-ending transience, requiring them to keep their suitcases both literally and metaphorically packed. In the decades since, the situation of the suitcase children has been called one of Turkish-German migration history’s “most difficult and painful” taboos, riddled with “unspoken trauma” in which parents violated their children’s basic trust and fostered lifelong misconceptions that they were worthless and unlovable. The prominent Turkish-German politician Cem Özdemir, who grew up in Germany, even recalled years later that he had suffered a recurring childhood “nightmare” that he, too, would be abandoned by his parents and sent back to Turkey.Footnote 128
Despite the subsequent repression of suitcase children’s psychological trauma, the phenomenon was no secret at the time. Rather, the plight of suitcase children was a regular theme in both Turkish and German discourses about migrants. An animated short film produced in 1983 as part of a pedagogical West German cassette series aimed toward Turkish guest worker families depicts a young boy named Ali who travels to Munich to reunite with his parents after living with his grandparents in the village of Gülbahar.Footnote 129 Symbolic of Ali’s physical and psychological burden, he stands with a suitcase grasped tightly in his hand, an enormous bindle slung behind his shoulder, and another bag jammed in the crook of his elbow. After jumping into his mother’s arms upon his arrival, his enthusiasm for Germany soon deteriorates. Homesick for his village, he misses his best friends (who, in a commentary on guest workers’ rural origins, are a rooster and a donkey) and spends his free time watching Turkish movies. Within a month, the situation turns brighter as he begins to integrate into German society, learn German, make friends, and dream of becoming an engineer. Yet the happy tale sours again when his father sends him back to Turkey. In the ominous closing scene, Ali – sitting at a desk with a notepad, protractor, and abacus – realizes that “there are, of course, no engineering schools in the village.” The film enjoyed a positive reception in Germany, as its didactic message helped Turkish and German children develop intercultural sympathy based on their shared struggles with making new friends.Footnote 130 The film also offered room for other interpretations by emphasizing the victimization of Turkish children at the hands of their parents, and by implying the superiority of life in West Germany’s urban and “modern” milieu.
A similar narrative, though with a different conclusion, appears in Turkish author Gülten Dayıoğlu’s 1980 novel Yurdumu Özledim (I Miss My Homeland). When a young boy named Atil learns that his parents will take him to Munich, his teacher hands him a Turkish flag and photograph of Atatürk and pontificates about Atil’s need to retain his national pride: “You are the child of an exalted and noble country with a glorious past that has lasted many thousands of years. You must be proud that you are a Turk and you may not feel inferior. Beware of disgracing your land and your people … Never forget that you are a Turk!”Footnote 131 Influenced by his teacher’s advice, Atil approaches life in Germany critically. Feeling like “a bird in a cage,” he rants that he would “rather eat dry bread and walk around in dirty clothes at home” than stay in Germany any longer. To Atil’s delight, his outburst helps his parents recognize their own homesickness, and the family returns to Turkey, with the novel ending happily.
Although the fictional stories of Ali and Atil portray their rural origins as central to their culture shock, many suitcase children came from cities and had a higher socioeconomic status. Born in Ankara in 1972, Bengü spent the first year of her life in Munich with her parents, both guest workers, who despite having white-collar jobs in Turkey opted to work in German factories for higher wages. Because they worked long hours, they placed Bengü under the daily care of a “German grandma” (Deutsche Oma) – an experience shared by many other guest worker children – until they discovered her husband’s borderline alcoholism.Footnote 132 Absent suitable childcare, they sent one-year-old Bengü back to Ankara to live with her grandparents. Over the next years, they sent her back and forth – at age two to Germany, at age five to Turkey, where she stayed until completing high school. During this time, her parents sent her regular letters and postcards and, like many other guest workers, recorded their voice messages on cassette tapes. Bengü’s younger sister, who lived with their parents in Germany, sent her colorful drawings. In one drawing, which aptly reflects the emotional experience of family separation, a house stands between Bengü on one side and her parents and sister on the other. After twelve years apart, Bengü ultimately chose to reunite with her parents and sister and studied English at a German university.
Murad, another suitcase child, experienced a similar situation. Born in 1973 in the West German city of Witten, he was sent to Istanbul to stay with his grandparents due to insufficient childcare. After just six months, his parents missed him so much that they brought him back to Germany. Eight years later, they sent him back to Istanbul so that he could become accustomed to Turkish schools in anticipation of the family’s planned remigration. Like so many other guest workers, however, they just “played with the idea of going back” and “never fully committed.”Footnote 133 Waiting for a return migration that never materialized, Murad thus spent his teenage years separated from his parents and younger sister until, like Bengü, he returned to Germany for university. Decades later, at age forty, Murad expressed pride in his identity as a suitcase child and emphatically rejected the notion that he was a “victim.” Instead, his experiences made him a “special kid” and “improved [his] personality” by exposing him to multiple perspectives. Murad did, however, experience long-term conflicts within his family. His relationship with his younger sister remained strained and distant throughout his life, as they did not grow up together and had vastly different childhoods. And his mother, the true “victim,” in his words, remained racked with guilt her entire life, missing the lost years she could have spent with her son.
As the transience of the suitcase children reveals, the categories of “children left behind” and “children born or raised in Germany” were not mutually exclusive. Common to their experiences, however, was the feeling that they were caught between two cultures, questioning their own identities. These concerns, though ubiquitous in sources on Turkish-German migration history, are particularly well expressed in a 1980 volume of Turkish children’s poems and short stories titled Täglich eine Reise von der Türkei nach Deutschland (Everyday a Journey from Turkey to Germany), whose German editors sought to give voice to youths “without a homeland.” One boy described the title’s meaning as a public–private spatial dichotomy: “When I leave my parents’ house in the morning, I leave Turkey. I then go to my job or to my friends and am in Germany. In the evenings, I return to my parents’ house and am back in Turkey.” More common than the spatial dichotomy, however, was the opposition of cultural and national identities. In one poem, a boy named Mehmet wrote, “I stand between two cultures / the Turkish and the German / I swing back and forth / and thus live in two worlds.”Footnote 134 This constant “swinging” fostered internal confusion. As another boy, Türkan, questioned: “Some say: ‘You are a German.’ Others say: ‘You are a German Turk.’ … My Turkish friends call me a German! … But what am I really?”Footnote 135 Reprinted verbatim in the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, the children’s writings conjured broader German sympathy for their plight.Footnote 136
Yet, overwhelmingly, Germans viewed Turkish children less as victims of confused identities and more as threats. They condemned their “illiteracy in two languages” as a burden on the education system that not only diminished the quality of German students’ education but also, according to more explicitly racializing rhetoric, portended Germany’s genetic and intellectual decline.Footnote 137 These concerns coincided with Germans’ reckoning with the broader transformation of urban space with the rise of family migration. As migrant families moved out of factory dormitories and into apartments, Germans fled to “nicer” parts of the city and decried the emergence of “Turkish ghettos” (like the iconic “Little Istanbul” in West Berlin’s Kreuzberg district) that seemingly testified to Turks’ unwillingness to integrate.Footnote 138 These “parallel societies,” as Germans often called them, were envisioned as particular sites of criminality and unrest, in which rowdy Turkish teenagers skipped class, loitered at parks, sold drugs, sexually assaulted German girls, and shouted insults like “German pig!” at elderly women.Footnote 139
Fears of Turkish children were exacerbated by migrants’ higher birthrates, with Turkish women derided as having their “wombs always full.”Footnote 140 German birthrates, by contrast, had declined due to the release of the birth control pill in 1961, the legalization of abortion in 1973, and the growing number of women working outside the home. This imbalance stoked existential fears, widely reported in the media and repeatedly discussed among policymakers, that Turks would numerically overtake Germans within a matter of decades.Footnote 141 Especially infuriating was guest workers’ alleged abuse of the social welfare system’s child allowance (Kindergeld), whereby residents received a monthly lump sum per child even if the child did not live in Germany. One newspaper reported on the case of a Turkish guest worker in Heidelberg who apparently had twenty-three children between his two wives in Turkey and earned an impressive 1,440 Deutschmarks in child allowances monthly, which far exceeded the amount of his salary.Footnote 142 As criticism of “welfare migrants” mounted, West Germany reformed its Kindergeld policy in 1974, offering less money for children who lived outside the European Economic Community.Footnote 143
Turks in the homeland, too, expressed an intense curiosity and mixed attitudes about guest worker children living abroad. While they sympathized with the children’s identity crises and discrimination, they also viewed them as threats to Turkish national identity. By the late 1970s, the notion that guest worker children were losing their Turkishness and turning into Germans had become ubiquitous, resulting in the proliferation of the colloquial term Almancı, or “Germanized Turk.” Although terms like “to become foreignized” (yabancılaşmak) or “to become Almancı” (Almancılașmak), or the passive “to have been made foreign” or “to have been made Almancı” had already been applied to their parents, the use of “Almancı children” (Almancı çocukları) and “Almancı youths” (Almancı gençleri) reinforced the second generation’s particular challenge.Footnote 144
Turkish journalists regularly expounded on the problems of Almancı children. In his 1975 book on his travels to Germany, Nevzat Üstün compared guest workers’ children to children living in Turkish villages. Replicating longstanding tropes of rural backwardness, he condemned the “pathetic” situation of “the Anatolian child,” who “has no school” and “does not know what sugar is, what honey is, what a toy is.” Although those in Germany appeared to live in better conditions “from a distance,” their situation was even more deplorable. “The only thing I know is that these children cannot learn their mother tongue, that they do not integrate into the society in which they are living, and that they are foreignized and corrupted.”Footnote 145 Daily news articles went as far as to demonize the children as “a social time bomb” and “cocky, rowdy, and un-Turkish.”Footnote 146 Yet the question of whom to blame for the children’s Germanization was debated. A 1976 Cumhuriyet article reporting general “News from Germany” blamed the Turkish nation as a whole, noting that “we have abandoned hundreds of thousands of our young people,” who are “adrift and alone.”Footnote 147
New forms of media, such as televised talk shows that reached elite city dwellers, transmitted audiovisual portrayals of Almancı children. Following a 1977 Turkish television interview, Erhan Önal, a guest worker’s son who had gained international acclaim as a star player on Germany’s Bayern-München soccer team, made headlines for demonstrating poor Turkish language skills and, by extension, for losing his Turkish identity. Yet, contrary to reports blaming Önal or his parents, one journalist leapt to his defense. “Certainly,” he wrote, “this young countryman of ours is not to be condemned or blamed. We left him alone to his fate and, ultimately, Erhan Önal is one person among a generation of children and youths who can be neither Germans nor Turks.”Footnote 148 Despite concerns about his cultural estrangement, in 1982 Önal moved to Turkey to play on the Turkish team Fenerbahçe (and later Galatasaray). Decades later, Turkish soccer fans continued to describe him as “one of our first emigrant (gurbetçi) football players,” often used interchangeably with “Almancı football players.”Footnote 149
While often exaggerated, the frequent references to Germanized children in Turkish media and popular culture reflected real anxieties held by their parents. A 1983 sociological study of Turkish housewives in West Germany reported that “women find it very problematic when the children orient themselves to the norms and values of their German environment. They observe this development with great worry.” Several mothers complained that their children’s exposure to German society had diminished both their parental authority and their children’s national and religious identities. “Outside, the children learn independence. At home, they don’t take me seriously anymore,” one mother complained. “They unlearn the Turkish language and no longer know our holidays,” and “They learn to kiss on the street,” others added.Footnote 150
The 1984 book Kalte Heimat (Cold Homeland) fictionalized these concerns based on German social workers’ observations of Turkish mothers during their therapy sessions. In one story, a mother named Fatma laments that her teenage children “have become like Germans.” She casts this Germanization in terms of rowdiness, laziness, and promiscuity, which contrasts with her unspoken perception of Turks’ superior discipline and morality. Not only do her children drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, and listen to American music, but her “egotistical” son drops out of school, refuses to get a job, just “screws around,” and “always wants money from me.” Her daughter “dresses like a hippie,” majors in German Studies, and takes contraceptive pills. “What will happen with our honor, our good reputation?” Fatma cries. “If word gets around, we won’t be able to be seen anywhere.”Footnote 151
Fatma’s woes about her daughter’s use of contraception reflect broader concerns about Almancı children’s sexuality. As in the case of the guest workers themselves, premarital sex and marriage with Germans were of particular concern. But, amid ongoing fears of their children’s Germanization, the intensity shifted, and the gendered script flipped: rather than male guest workers’ sex with German women, the target became Turkish girls’ sex with German boys. Upon reaching adulthood, some daughters of guest workers expressed a clear preference for marrying outside their nationality. “I would never marry a Turkish man,” one young woman asserted. Echoing tropes about Turkish men’s patriarchy – the very same tropes that Germans invoked in the service of racism – she complained that Turkish men “are far too authoritarian,” whereas German men “take better care of their wives” and are “more liberal” and “good natured.”Footnote 152 Many were concerned about their family’s reaction. One woman recalled keeping her relationship a secret, while another feared her brothers would “kill” her if they found out.Footnote 153
Yet, overwhelmingly, there was not much that was particularly “German” about parents’ ideas about what it meant to “Germanize” (aside from the language). Rather, the term referred to the children’s embrace of much larger trends common throughout European and American youth cultures at the time, such as fashion, music, and sexual freedom. Ironically, these were the same corrupting influences that many Germans, particularly those of the conversative 1950s postwar generation, also decried.Footnote 154 Neither was Turkey itself immune to the truancy, unemployment, partying, drug use, and sexual promiscuity that were prominent in cities across the globe. In this sense, Turkish parents’ fears were not necessarily of “Germanization” but rather of urbanization – that the children were falling victim to the corrupting influences of city life.
While this fallacy was lost on Turkish parents, it does not invalidate the gravity of their concerns (as well as broader Turkish national concerns) about guest workers’ children. From mohawks and leather jackets to cigarettes and contraception, material symbols of Germanization were mere proxies for the much larger sense of cultural abandonment. For the parents of guest worker children, this abandonment primarily threatened the breakdown of the family. But for Turks observing the migrants from abroad, this abandonment threatened the breakdown of the Turkish nation. Alongside physical distance and sexual transgression, the situation of Almancı children was among the most important factors that tested the boundaries of national identity and heightened wariness about migrants in both Germany and their homeland.
*****
In 1990, three decades after the start of the guest worker program, a German television station broadcasted the performance of a Turkish arabesque band singing a mournful folksong with the simple title: “Almanya” or “Germany.” Capturing the guest workers’ collective memory, the ballad goes: “From all corners of our homeland we were brought together and packed onto the train at Sirkeci Station … Those who remained waved to us with tearful eyes. How is one supposed to remain silent? Almanya, you have separated us from our loved ones.”Footnote 155
The idea that an all-powerful “Almanya” was to blame for the plight of guest workers and their families is both deceptive and inaccurate, for it perpetuates the notion that guest workers were powerless pawns with no decision-making ability of their own. In reality, the dynamics were different: Germany, of course, needed guest workers, but the guest workers also needed (or at least desired) Germany. Their decision to venture forth into the unknown points to their strength, courage, and initiative. It was their conscious quest to improve their lives that compelled them to navigate complex political, economic, and social structures in two countries and to grapple with forces beyond their control. From forging new friendships to maintaining connections to home, to having sex with Germans or abandoning their spouses and children altogether – all of these were active, rational, and emotional choices.
Why, then, blame “Almanya”? Working through decades of emotional baggage is no easy task, especially when that baggage has been repeatedly lugged back and forth between two countries 3,000 kilometers apart. Blaming “Almanya” thus became a useful strategy for deflecting discomfort and bottling up bad feelings. For the most part, contradicting the song lyrics, guest workers did take ownership of their actions, from their triumphs to their missteps. Some openly mourned the lost time of missed birthdays, holidays, major life events, and everyday companionship. Others, however, kept the pangs of remorse as a dark secret.
Cutting deeper than individuals and families, the scars of abandonment became crucial to how both Germans and Turks in the homeland perceived migrants. For Germans, the perception of guest workers’ homesickness and yearning for companionship operated alongside racist and Orientalist tropes of violence, criminality, and hypersexuality by which fears of rapacious dark-skinned Turks sexually violating blonde-haired, blue-eyed German women stood as a proxy for the violation of German borders by racial others. For the homeland, largely unsubstantiated rumors of adultery portrayed guest workers as destroying not only marital bonds but also the stability of village and communal life. And children – whether left in Turkey, brought to Germany, or shuttled back and forth – were viewed in both countries as victims and threats. Symbols of migrants’ insufficient integration or – in the eyes of the homeland – excessive “Germanization,” they transgressed not only borders but also national identities.
In the mid-1970s, the Frankfurt branch of the Turkish bank Türkiye İş Bankası distributed a roadmap to Turkish guest workers.Footnote 1 Hoping to wrest this hotly desired customer base from the clutches of leading West German competitors such as Deutsche Bank and Sparkasse, Türkiye İş Bankası – like many Turkish firms of the time – appealed to the guest workers’ nostalgia for home. The front cover depicts a quaint Bavarian scene, with a cheerful blonde man in full Lederhosen and a traditional feathered cap, grinning as he drinks from a foamy beer stein. In stark contrast, the back cover features a modernizing, industrial Turkey, with a skyscraper looming behind a Turkish half-moon flag. The message is clear: in the years since the migrants had left the poverty and dilapidation of their home villages in the hopes of amassing great wealth, Turkey, too, had begun to industrialize. Investing their Deutschmarks in Turkish banks would not only be as lucrative as investing in West German ones but would also support the economy of their homeland – and, accordingly, the well-being of the families they left behind.Footnote 2
More striking than the roadmap’s advertising strategy are its contents once unfolded.Footnote 3 The map does not depict the municipal street plan of Frankfurt, where the would-be customers lived, but rather a much broader system of international highways, centered around Europastraße 5 (E-5), or Europe Street 5, which stretched from West Germany by way of Munich through Austria, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria to Istanbul.Footnote 4 At the height of the Cold War, the road featured on the map traversed the entire Central European continent, providing a clear-cut path across the imagined boundary of the Iron Curtain. Given that guest workers had been recruited to work and live within the spatial confines of West Germany, the map’s expansive reach is puzzling. If guest workers lived right in the bank’s own backyard, why would they need a map of Cold War European highways? Would it not have been more pertinent to provide a map of Frankfurt’s own roadways, which the guest workers could have used to find their way from their homes to the bank branch?
The map of Cold War Europe’s international highways was in fact a crucial tool for Turkish guest workers in West Germany. At least once per year, they revved the engines of their (usually) pre-owned Mercedes-Benzes and Fords – for many, the products of the factories at which they worked – and set off on a three-day car ride on Europastraße 5 en route to Turkey. Perhaps best conceived as small seasonal remigrations, or even pilgrimages, vacations to the home country were widespread activities, occurring during the summer months and less commonly during Christmas time. While the West German government and media tended to use the German word Heimaturlaube, or “vacations to the homeland,” the guest workers themselves, as well as those in the home country, typically used the Turkish word izin, which translates literally to “permission” or “leave.” As Ruth Mandel has noted, the concept of “leaving” or “taking leave” was in reality more of an “undertaking,” since the car ride involved not only substantial planning and capital expense but also long travel times, dangerous roads, emotional energy, and physical exhaustion.Footnote 5
While financial expenditure sometimes prohibited guest workers from taking the trip every year, they generally made it a priority. Far more so than letters, postcards, phone calls, and cassette recordings, physically traveling to Turkey assuaged homesickness and fears of abandonment because it allowed guest workers and their families to reunite face-to-face. In the 1960s, when single guest workers yearned for their spouses, children, parents, and lovers left behind, vacations gave them the sole opportunity to hug, kiss, and spend time together. With the rise in family migration of the 1970s, vacations assumed new meaning as a crucial tactic for preserving “Germanized” children’s connection to Turkey. For children who grew up primarily in Turkey, vacations were generally joyous occasions to spend time with dearly missed friends. For children born or raised in West Germany, vacations familiarized them with a faraway “homeland” that they might otherwise have known only from their parents’ stories.
But the seemingly mundane act of taking vacations, as this chapter reveals, held much more significance: the road trip across the Iron Curtain, as well as the reunions upon arrival, not only tied the migrants closer to their friends, family, and neighbors at home, but also pushed them farther apart. The migrants’ unsavory experiences traveling through socialist Yugoslavia and communist Bulgaria on the E-5 confirmed their affiliation with the democratic, capitalist “West,” encouraging them to transmute their disdain for the Cold War “East” onto the perceived underdevelopment of Turkish villages. And more so than the rumors of abandonment, face-to-face contact provided firsthand impressions of how, year after year, guest workers and their children increasingly transformed into Almancı, or Germanized Turks. This sense of cultural estrangement involved not only mannerisms and language skills but also material objects. Even though in reality most struggled financially, guest workers used their vacations as an opportunity to perform their wealth and status as evidence of their success – that they had “made it” in Germany. Envious of the cars and consumer goods that guest workers flaunted upon their return, those in the homeland began to perceive the migrants as a nouveau-riche class of superfluous spenders who were out of touch with Turkish values and had adopted the habit of conspicuous consumption – a trait that many Turks associated with West Germany at the time (Figure 2.1). By using their Deutschmarks selfishly rather than for the good of impoverished village communities, they had stabbed their own nation in the back.
Figure 2.1 A quintessential portrayal of an Almancı, whom Turks in the home country denigrated as superfluous spenders, flaunting his Deutschmarks and posing proudly in front of his loaded-up car, 1984.
Travelers, Tourists, Border Crossers
Despite spending long hours performing what West Germans called “dirty work” (Drecksarbeit) in factories and mines, Turkish guest workers were by no means an oppressed, nameless, faceless proletariat exploited by their employers and tied to their places of work as immobile peons. They experienced vibrant lives and social interactions centered not only in the space of the company-sponsored dormitory but also throughout West German cityscapes – participating to varying degrees in the world around them through everyday activities such as eating at restaurants, drinking at bars, attending cultural events, and shopping.Footnote 6 Yet guest workers and their family members in Germany did not spend their leisure time only in the cities surrounding their workplaces. Nor did their excursions take place only after work hours and on weekends. Rather, the migrants were highly mobile border crossers, who took vacations to other European countries during their holiday breaks from work and, at least once per year, traveled back to Turkey to visit their families, neighbors, and friends. The ability to take lengthy vacations of up to four weeks at a time, given West Germans’ generous paid leave policy, was not only central to their personal migration experiences but also created much broader tensions. Employers imposed harsh disciplinary measures, including firing, on guest workers who failed to return to work on time, and the West German and Turkish governments – along with corporations – jockeyed to control and profit from guest workers’ travel.
Effective trade unions, a powerful component of political life in the West German social welfare state since the establishment of the Federal Republic in 1949, ensured that guest workers received time off from their jobs – particularly during Christmas and summertime, when their children were out of school. Although guest workers’ relationships with the trade unions were strained by discrimination and mistrust, trade unions upheld West Germany’s “right to vacation” (Urlaubsrecht), which was codified in 1963, just two years after the signing of the guest worker recruitment agreement with Turkey.Footnote 7 The Federal Vacation Law (Bundesurlaubsgesetz), which applied also to guest workers, required employers to provide a minimum of twenty-four days, or roughly five weeks, of paid vacation per year.Footnote 8 Accompanying the legally codified right to vacations was another perk: guest workers’ work and residence permits, which afforded them the opportunity to travel freely throughout other European Economic Community member states – a privilege extended to other Turkish citizens only when in possession of tourist visas.
While the most common form of travel was the Heimaturlaub or izin vacation to Turkey, many others went sightseeing in nearby Western European countries. Family photographs depict groups of primarily male guest workers tanning on beaches in Cannes and posing in front of the Seine River in Paris, the narrow alleys of Venice, and the many fountains of Amsterdam – all the while smiling with cameras hanging around their necks.Footnote 9 Those who lived in West Berlin regularly took day trips (Tagesausflüge) to East Germany, since unlike West Germans, Turkish guest workers were permitted to cross the Berlin Wall with foreign tourist visas, as long as they returned by midnight.Footnote 10 Taking these trips, especially those to Western Europe, was a matter of privilege, however. Despite affordable bus and train travel to neighboring countries, even a short weekend trip still entailed great financial expense. Guest workers therefore needed to calculate whether they had sufficient funds left over for a short getaway after paying for rent, food, and other basic necessities and sending remittances to their families in Turkey.
Guest workers generally recalled their vacations to Western Europe fondly. Yaşar, the self-appointed “social organizer” of a local music club in Göppingen, enjoyed planning semiannual affordable bus tours of neighboring countries for around fifty of his German and Turkish friends and their family members.Footnote 11 He and his wife also took frequent weekend trips to nearby Switzerland, where they stocked up on the famed Swiss chocolate to bring back to Turkey as gifts. London, with its bright red double-decker buses, proved especially exciting. But France was his favorite country, because a friendly Parisian woman had once offered him assistance when he was lost. While his trips to Italy were “not as nice,” he delighted in the scenic beauty of Venice. Though based on limited experiences and anecdotal encounters, Yaşar’s pleasant experiences during these travels shaped his identity. While he felt adamantly Turkish, he insisted that he “lived like a European” – despite having to decline pork while trying national cuisines.
Gül, whom neighbors in Şarköy called “the woman with the German house,” fondly recounted visiting Istanbul for her sister’s engagement party in 1965 – a trip that surprisingly led to a marvelous vacation in Vienna. Always eager to chat, the then twenty-nine-year-old seamstress struck up a conversation with a middle-aged Austrian couple who were traveling on the same train as tourists to Istanbul. The couple invited Gül and her sister to visit them at their posh home in Vienna. After a week of drinking Viennese coffee and sightseeing, most memorably at the stunning Schönbrunn Palace, the sisters took a train to Gül’s home near her textile factory in Göppingen. The journey allowed Gül not only to experience life in Vienna but also to help her sister enter West Germany as a tourist and work “quietly” (in Ruhe) – a euphemistic term that Gül used to describe her sister’s illegal employment.Footnote 12 Like Yaşar, Gül developed a positive impression of Western Europe, associating it with friendliness, beauty, consumption, and luxury even decades later.
Despite the prevalence of touristic travel throughout Western Europe, most guest workers took their annual leave all at once and used it during the summer for a one-month stay with their relatives at home. This pattern resulted in a massive summertime increase in travel between the two countries. Despite Turkey’s status as a NATO member state, it was still relatively low on Germans’ list of vacation destinations during the 1960s, not least because of the distance, the language barrier, and longstanding tropes about Muslim cultural difference. When Germans did travel to Turkey, they typically expressed a sort of Orientalist curiosity about the exotic “East.” As one 1962 travel guide described it, “the land between Europe and the Orient” was so tantalizing that German visitors “never packed enough film for their cameras” and “one always hears the joyful cries: ‘Oh, these colors, this vibrancy, this diversity!’”Footnote 13 Travel from Turkey to West Germany was also relatively limited. In 1963, the Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet advertised a company called Bosphorus Tourism that offered bus tours from Istanbul to Rome, Paris, London, and Hamburg, with stops along the international highway Europastraße 5 in Sofia, Belgrade, Vienna, and Munich.Footnote 14 But affording these lavish tours, especially given the high currency exchange rate, was a privilege available only to elite, wealthy, urbanites.
Yet the existing tourism offerings were no match for the guest-worker-fueled boom in travel between the two countries in the 1960s. To accommodate vacationing guest workers, the West German government, railway system, and individual firms all organized special travel options. In 1963, the Ford factory in Cologne granted Turkish guest workers an additional three weeks of vacation time and contracted special trains for them, with discounted roundtrip tickets.Footnote 15 During the 1972 Christmas season, the German Federal Railways (Deutsche Bundesbahn) commissioned special half-priced charter trains to the home countries of all guest worker nationalities.Footnote 16 Political events also put officials on alert for a surge in guest worker travel. In anticipation of the June 5, 1977, parliamentary elections in Turkey, for which voting by mail was not an option, the Federal Railways once again organized charter trains from Frankfurt and Munich to Istanbul.Footnote 17
Guest workers’ vacations were also a matter of international importance, creating conflict between the West German and Turkish governments when it came to air travel. Though flying was far less common than driving in the 1960s and 1970s, airlines competed over guest workers as customers. In April 1970, representatives from both countries’ governments and airlines signed a “pool agreement” between Turkey’s publicly owned Turkish Airlines and the West German private companies Lufthansa, Atlantis, Condor, Bavaria, GermanAir, and PanInternational.Footnote 18 Aiming to even the playing field, the pool agreement fixed prices between Istanbul and ten German cities and required guest workers’ air travel to be split 50–50 between the two countries. West German firms, however, complained that Turkish Airlines (and hence the Turkish government) was breaching the agreement. Turkish Airlines’ monopoly in Turkey due to the ban on private companies serving Turkish airports meant that it could offer a much more flexible schedule, whereas competition among West Germany’s private airlines required dividing the number of flights among them. West German flights were permitted to land only in Istanbul, whereas Turkish Airlines could serve all the country’s airports. Rumor also had it that Turkish Airlines tickets were available on the black market for cheap and that passing through customs in Turkey was much easier if a guest worker traveled on Turkish Airlines.Footnote 19
Amid the Cold War context of Germany’s internal division, tensions over guest workers’ travels also strained relations between East and West Germany. In the 1960s, guest workers living in West Berlin flew to Turkey without exception through West Berlin’s Tegel Airport. Problems began in 1973, however, when Turkish Airlines began offering flights through East Berlin’s Schönefeld Airport. Given the cheaper prices and Schönefeld’s closer proximity to the heavily Turkish neighborhoods of Kreuzberg and Neukölln, guest workers increasingly opted to cross the Berlin Wall and fly out of East Berlin. The situation intensified in 1977, when East Germany’s budget airline Interflug commenced flights to Turkey, attracting 45 percent of guest workers. Concerned about the detrimental economic effect, the West German government repeatedly implored the Turkish government to reduce the number of Turkish Airlines flights through Schönefeld and to pressure Interflug to adhere to the fixed prices.Footnote 20 Yet little changed. In 1981, in an expression of Cold War paranoia, the West German newspaper Die Zeit attributed the “unfair competition” to a Moscow-led conspiracy to destroy the West German economy.Footnote 21
In terms of everyday life, guest workers’ vacations often caused conflicts with employers. Despite the legal right to vacation, their work and residence permits were beholden to the whims of floor managers, foremen, and other higher-ups prone to discriminating against Turkish employees, and a tardy return made a convenient excuse for firing them. Rumors about these firings became especially worrisome after the 1973 OPEC oil crisis, the associated economic downturn, and the subsequent moratorium on guest worker recruitment, when criticisms of Turkish workers “taking the jobs of native Germans” increased. The metalworkers’ trade union IG Metall spoke out against an “immoral” trend whereby some employers handed out termination-of-contract notices before the holiday season and then promised the workers their jobs back if they returned early enough.Footnote 22 Such clever though nefarious policies forced guest workers to choose between losing their jobs or sacrificing the opportunity to travel home. Although these discriminatory policies were rare, the rumors influenced guest workers’ decisions. A representative of the German Confederation of Trade Unions noted a marked decline in the number of Turkish guest workers who booked trips home via the German Federal Railways, which she attributed to their fear of being fired even though these concerns were “mostly unfounded.”Footnote 23
Termination due to late return from vacation was most publicized during the August 1973 “wildcat strike” (wilder Streik) at the Ford automotive factory in Cologne, during which as many as 10,000 Turkish guest workers went on strike for multiple days alongside their German colleagues.Footnote 24 The Ford strike marked a turning point in Turkish-German migration history: taking place just months before the recruitment stop, it was a crucial moment of Turkish activism, resistance, and agency in which migrants demanded their rights and proved that they were not an easily disposable labor source.Footnote 25 In a transnational frame, the Ford workers were also inspired by the hundreds of organized strikes by trade unions in Turkey, which contributed to Turkey’s 1971 and 1980 military coups and stoked fears that guest workers would import Turkish leftist radicalism into West Germany amid the Cold War.Footnote 26 Despite protesting labor conditions broadly, the immediate trigger of the Ford strike was the firing of 300 Turks who returned late from their summer vacations.Footnote 27 Süleyman Baba Targün, one of the strike’s leaders, had missed the deadline to extend his work permit because of car trouble while driving along the Europastraße 5. Although Targün’s work permit had expired just days prior to his reentry into West Germany, the Foreigner Office (Ausländeramt) of Cologne classified him as “illegal.” Partly as payback for his leadership role in the Ford strike, his appeal to the federal government to extend his residence permit was rejected. By Christmas, Targün was set for deportation to Turkey, where, to compound his problems, he faced a prison sentence for anti-government political activity.Footnote 28
Despite such high-profile cases, most guest workers took comfort in knowing that their right to vacation remained “just as firm” as it did for Germans – as long as they returned punctually.Footnote 29 Still, when threatened with travel delays, they often went to great lengths to avoid being fired. In 1963, one guest worker asked a Turkish Railways station director to send his boss a telegram testifying that his tardy return owed to a heavy snowfall that had prevented trains from traveling between Edirne and Istanbul.Footnote 30 In 1975, in a far more tumultuous and widely publicized situation, a Turkish Airlines flight from Yeşilköy to Düsseldorf carrying 345 Turkish passengers returning from their summer vacations made headlines when a twenty-four-hour delay caused massive unrest. Infuriated passengers ran onto the runway and attempted to storm the aircraft, shouting “Why are you treating us like slaves?” and “Rights that are not given must be taken!” To suppress the insurrection, airport security officials blocked the protestors with tanks. Several passengers were injured, and a father traveling with his young son was rushed to the hospital after fainting due to poor ventilation in the terminal.Footnote 31 To avoid such situations, guest workers adjusted their travel plans accordingly. Following this incident, Yılmaz avoided Turkish Airlines and opted for the reputed “German punctuality” of Lufthansa.Footnote 32
Guest workers’ job security was also jeopardized by shady Turkish travel agents, who exploited them by forging tickets and selling far more seats than were available. One guest worker collaborated with GermanAir as co-plaintiffs in a lawsuit against a travel agency that had overbooked a flight from Istanbul to Düsseldorf, resulting in his tardy return.Footnote 33 The problem was more systemic, however. In 1970, officials at the Düsseldorf Airport complained to the West German transportation ministry about a nightmarish day, with one problem after the other – all caused by Turkish travel agencies.Footnote 34 Anticipating an influx of Turkish travelers, the airport had not only commissioned additional border officials for passport checks, but had also set up a 4,000 square-foot tent outdoors, with makeshift check-in counters, luggage carts, chairs, lighting, loudspeakers, toilets, and even a refreshment stand. But even more travelers arrived than had been expected, and by noon it became clear that hundreds held fraudulent tickets. In one of many such incidents, 110 passengers were stranded for three days because their travel agency had sold enough tickets for two flights even though only one had been scheduled. Expressing no sympathy, some blamed the “chaos” not on the travel agencies, but on the travelers. The next day, Neue Rhein Zeitung reported that “hordes” of “men of the Bosphorus” from the “land under the half-moon” had been “shoving themselves” through the airport and having “temper tantrums.” “But what’s the point?” the article quipped: “After all, for 450 DM to Istanbul and back, you can’t expect first class service.”Footnote 35
As this racist and Orientalist rhetoric suggests, many West Germans exploited guest workers’ right to vacation as another weapon in their arsenal of discrimination. Not only did employers use a tardy return as an excuse to fire unwanted workers, but the overwhelmingly negative portrayal of guest workers’ travel reinforced stereotypes of Turkish criminality and backwardness that cast Turks as shady, deceitful, and dangerous. German airline firms blamed both Turkish Airlines and the Turkish government for violating international agreements. Airport officials lambasted Turkish travel agencies’ shady business practices and emphasized the overall chaos of being overrun by Turkish passengers. And, even though the guest workers were the real victims in these situations, the German media portrayed them as temperamental, violent aggressors who threatened the stability of air travel. Guest workers’ vacations were thus not only a private but also a public matter: their mobility could also be mobilized against them.
On the “Road of Death” through the Balkans
Far more than trains, buses, and airplanes, most guest workers vacationed to Turkey by car. Cars not only permitted autonomy and flexibility, but also served as a means of transporting large quantities of consumer goods from West Germany to Turkey and of securing heightened social status among friends and relatives. In the 1960s and 1970s, the only major route from West Germany to Turkey was the Europastraße 5 (Europe Street 5, or the E-5), the 3,000-kilometer international highway that spanned eastward across Central Europe and the Balkans through neutral Austria, socialist Yugoslavia, and communist Bulgaria, passing through Munich, Salzburg, Graz, Zagreb, Belgrade, Sofia, and Edirne. An alternative sub-route, which bypassed Bulgaria and went through Greece and the Yugoslav–Greek border at Evzonoi, posed too lengthy a detour. And while some Turks in West Berlin opted for a different route through East Germany, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, the E-5 was by far the most common.
The journey across Cold War Europe was not easy. Traumatizing for some, adventurous for others, the drive from Munich to Istanbul alone lasted a minimum of two days and two nights, assuming the driver sped through, and much longer if they stopped along the way to catch much-needed shut-eye at a local roadside hotel. Yet, even as the migrants sighed with relief and kissed the ground as they crossed the Bulgarian-Turkish border at Kapıkule, the journey was not over. Considering that most Turkish travelers were journeying to Anatolian hometowns and villages much farther than Istanbul, such as the eastern provinces of Kars and Erzurum, the journey could take three or four days. Aside from the tediousness, the car ride also posed numerous dangers because of poor infrastructure, as well as traffic and weather conditions. Unpaved roads, seemingly endless lines of vehicles steered by overtired drivers, bribe-hungry border guards, fears of theft and vandalism, sleeping in cars, eating and urinating along the road – all remain vividly etched in both personal memory and popular culture. Reminiscing about both the hardship and the emotional significance of the journey, one Turkish migrant wrote in a poem: “Between Cologne and Ankara / One must speed through to arrive. / In between lie three thousand kilometers. / Who would drive it if he were not homesick?”Footnote 36
Turks were not the only guest workers who made the arduous annual trek along the E-5. The geography of the European continent meant that Yugoslavs and Greeks took the same route. Given that Yugoslavia was geographically closer to West Germany, Yugoslavs’ journey was a day shorter. Greeks, rather than passing through Bulgaria like Turks did, veered rightward at the Yugoslav city of Niš, switching to a different route through Skopje, Evzonoi, and Thessaloniki all the way south to Athens. Because of the diverse nationalities of the travelers, West Germans and Austrians often homogenized the E-5 into a migration route not only for Turks but also for all guest workers and “foreigners.” Across nationalities, travelers often recalled similar experiences, albeit mediated by their own individual circumstances and the varying historical, social, and cultural ties they had to the countries that they passed through. Nevertheless, given that Turks became West Germany’s largest ethnic minority in the late 1970s – and hence numerically the largest group of vacationing migrants – the E-5 gradually became associated primarily with them. While each migrant had a distinct narrative of their journey, their accounts converged into a collective experience that fundamentally shaped their identities and broader Cold War tensions.
The E-5 earned numerous monikers and substantially shaped the way that all Turks, not just guest workers, imagined migration. Guest workers typically referred to it fondly as “the road home” (sıla yolu), emphasizing its importance to their national identities. West German names ranged from “the guest worker street” (Gastarbeiterstraße), which emphasized that not only Turks but also guest workers from Greece and Yugoslavia traveled along it, to “the road of death” (Todesstrecke), which sensationalized its dangerous conditions and the high prevalence of fatal accidents. The highway was also ubiquitous in Turkish popular culture. E-5 is the title of Turkish author Güney Dal’s 1979 novel in which a man transports his deceased father along the highway for burial in his home country; this theme also appears in Turkish-German director Yasemin Şamdereli’s acclaimed 2011 film Almanya – Willkommen in Deutschland (Almanya – Welcome to Germany).Footnote 37 In 1992, Tünç Okan’s internationally released film Sarı Mercedes (Mercedes Mon Amour), based on Adalet Ağaoğlu’s 1976 novel, told the story of a guest worker’s journey along the E-5 to marry a woman in Turkey and show off his luxurious car.Footnote 38 The sixty-minute documentary E5 – Die Gastarbeiterstraße, directed by Turkish filmmaker Tuncel Kurtiz, was broadcast on Swedish television in 1978, and in 1988, the Turkish television series Korkmazlar aired an episode titled “Tatil” (The Vacation) in which guest workers travel along the E-5 to visit relatives in Turkey, giving rise to comedic cultural conflict along the way.Footnote 39 The road also appeared in music. “E-5” was the name of a Turkish-German music group formed in the 1980s, whose style – a mixture of rock n’ roll, jazz, and Turkish folk music – paid homage to the road connecting the “Occident” and the “Orient.” In 1997, the Turkish-German rap group Karakan recalled their childhood road trips in a song titled “Kapıkule’ye Kadar” (To Kapıkule) named after the Turkish-Bulgarian border.Footnote 40
The most extensive media portrayal of the E-5 was an alarmist, ten-page article in the leading West German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, published in 1975 (Figure 2.2). The article sensationalized the treacherous conditions along the E-5 – which, it elaborated, ensured “near-murder” and “certain suicide” – and noted forebodingly that annual fatalities on E-5-registered roads exceeded those on the entire Autobahn network, as well as the number of casualties in the previous decade’s Cyprus War.Footnote 41 A 330-kilometer stretch through the curvy roads of the Austrian Alps – precarious during the summer but even worse during the icy winter – was allegedly the site of over 5,000 accidents annually, and on the highway’s Yugoslav portion, one person supposedly died every two hours. As the article explained, travelers who did not succumb fatally to this “rally of no return” faced psychological torment due to tedious stop-and-go traffic, with bottlenecks caused by accidents in poorly lit tunnels. Particularly notorious were two unventilated 2,400- and 1,600-meter tunnels in Austria, which plagued travelers with anxiety and shortness of breath.Footnote 42
Figure 2.2 Map of the Europastraße 5 (E-5), titled “Death Trek to Istanbul,” published in a sensationalist 1975 article.
Reflecting anti-guest worker biases prevalent in Der Spiegel at the time, the same article blamed these harsh conditions not only on environmental and infrastructural problems but also on the guest workers themselves. Invoking rhetoric common in criticism of migrants, the article described the caravan of cars filled with Turkish travelers as an “irresistible and uncontrollable force” and a “mass invasion,” which posed serious problems for local Austrian communities and border officials. In 1969, local officials near Graz had called upon the Austrian military for assistance in policing guest workers’ traffic violations, resulting in the deployment of six tanks and 120 steel-helmeted riflemen – an incident that the newspaper jokingly called “the first military campaign against guest workers.” As the years passed, officials increasingly felt their hands tied. One Senior Lieutenant of the Styrian state police expressed frustration at the number of cars needing standard ten-minute inspections at the Austrian-Yugoslav border: “If we were to catch eight Turks in a five-person car, what would we do with the surplus? Should we leave behind the grandma and the brothers, or the children? Who would take them in? The nearest hotel, the community? Or should we establish a camp for [them]? Here I am already hearing the word ‘concentration camp!’”Footnote 43 While it is unclear who was beginning to invoke the term “concentration camp,” the lieutenant’s remark demonstrated his self-conscious concern that, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the detention of foreign travelers – particularly elderly women and children – could devolve into public accusations of human rights violations.
Centuries-old tensions between the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires were also a reference point. Dramatically, the article quipped: “‘The Turks are coming!’ has become a cry of distress for Alp-dwellers and Serbs – almost as once for their forefathers when the Janissaries approached on the very same age-old path.” By condemning Turkish travelers as a terrifying invasion of Janissaries, the elite corps of the Ottoman Empire’s standing army, Der Spiegel alluded to the bloody 1683 Battle of Vienna, which occurred after the Ottoman military had occupied the Habsburg capital for two months. And by explicitly using the phrase “ancient migration route,” the article characterized the region not as strictly demarcated by national borders, but rather as a space of deeply rooted travel, mobility, and exchange. However facetious, the interpretation reflected the importance of the Ottoman past in shaping twentieth-century attitudes toward Turkish guest workers. Nearly three hundred years later, ancient hatreds of “bloodthirsty Turks” and the Ottoman “other” remained a racializing anti-Turkish trope.Footnote 44
Far from a military threat, the article continued, local Austrians’ terror manifested in a constant onslaught of revving motors, piles of garbage, and human excrement. Making matters worse, the locals received little to no economic benefit from what might otherwise have constituted a touristic boon. To save money, Turkish travelers generally did not patronize Austrian restaurants, hotels, and souvenir shops. Instead, they preferred to sleep in their cars, eat pre-prepared meals, and cook using an electric stovetop. They also avoided Austrian gas stations because they considered refueling in Yugoslavia much more economical.Footnote 45 Despite these tensions, some local Austrians were willing to assist the travelers by placing cautionary Turkish-language signs on dangerous stretches of road and building a “Muslim Rest Stop” with a makeshift prayer room, meals free of pork and alcohol, and an Austrian transportation official on site.Footnote 46
The West German government, too, expressed concern about the E-5’s treacherous conditions. Around the same time as the sensationalist Der Spiegel article, the Federal Labor Ministry launched a public campaign to educate guest workers about proper driving habits. The forum was Arbeitsplatz Deutschland (Workplace Germany), a newsletter for guest workers published in multiple languages that sought to provide advice – sometimes useful, sometimes not – on aspects of life in West Germany. Many of the newsletter’s articles took a didactic, paternalistic tone. Presuming that many guest workers, especially the Turks, came from rural areas stereotyped as “backward,” the articles portrayed them as in need of enlightenment – or at least of a rudimentary orientation to the norms of life in “industrialized,” “urbanized,” and “modern” societies. In a series titled “The ABCs of the Car Driver,” which ran from the mid-1970s through the mid-1990s, the Labor Ministry instructed guest workers on traffic rules and safety, such as not driving without a license, following traffic signs and signals, paying more attention to children crossing the street, and eating a full breakfast to avoid hunger on the road.Footnote 47
Responding to the shocking media reports on the E-5, the newsletter published a six-page, multi-article feature sponsored by the German Council on Traffic Safety, titled “Vacation Safely in Summer 1977.”Footnote 48 The Turkish edition’s cover featured a dark-haired husband, wife, and three children loading suitcases into a car, about to embark on the journey to the “hot countries in the South.” Among the articles was a cautionary tale, in which a stereotypically named guest worker (“Mustafa” in the Turkish edition, “José Pérez” in the Spanish) had saved 4,000 DM to purchase a used van from his friend, only to find out halfway through his 3,000-kilometer journey that the brakes were defective. “Had Mustafa inspected the car beforehand? Far from it!” the article decried. “His friend had given him a ‘guarantee,’ saying the car was like new!” Mustafa had also failed to check alternative routes, insisting that his was the shortest, and refused to obey speed limits and to avoid forbidden entry roads. Guest workers like Mustafa, the newsletter insisted, justified their flagrant disregard for traffic safety with pride: “If you’re not brave, then don’t get on the road!”Footnote 49 While readership statistics are unavailable, the newsletter’s continued references to inept drivers on the E-5 in the 1980s suggest that the warnings had little impact.
Amid broader Cold War geopolitics, government and media reports also perpetuated self-aggrandizing critiques of socialism and communism by blaming the Balkan countries for the E-5’s dangerous conditions. While these reports typically attributed the dangers in Austria to snow, ice, and other inclement weather, Arbeitsplatz Deutschland echoed tropes of “Eastern” backwardness. Yugoslav roadways, the newsletter noted, were “not up to the standards of modern traffic.” In contrast to Germany’s esteemed Autobahn, only one-third of the E-5’s Yugoslav portion was paved, and traffic officers failed to enforce safety regulations. Travelers were thus forced to endure “curves and obstacles without warning, swerving trucks, cars without lights, tractors that disregard the right of way, and agricultural vehicles or even animals crossing the road.” Accompanying photographs depicted a large herd of sheep alongside a smashed car.Footnote 50
Guest workers, too, perceived an immediate change as soon as they crossed the Austrian-Yugoslav border into the Balkans. On the one hand, they took comfort in knowing that every kilometer they drove eastward brought them closer to their homeland. Some even felt a “comfortable ease and relaxation” in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria.Footnote 51 Murad recalled that one of the highlights of the trip was eating at a roadside restaurant in Yugoslavia that served ćevapi, a minced-meat kebab similar to the Turkish köfte, which reminded him of home.Footnote 52 Others recalled that Bulgarians were able to communicate using Turkish words, many of which had long entered the Bulgarian language.Footnote 53 This sense of shared culture, like Der Spiegel’s remark about Janissaries, further reflects the legacy of centuries-long Ottoman rule in the region.
Yet, overwhelmingly, Turkish travelers perceived extreme animosity from local Yugoslavs and Bulgarians, making the drive east of the Iron Curtain especially fearsome. This animosity, as Der Spiegel’s comment about Janissaries evidenced, owed in part to the especially bitter memory of Ottoman conquest in the Balkans.Footnote 54 Whereas Austrians’ fears of Ottoman invasion reached a height at the 1683 Battle of Vienna, Balkan populations endured both indirect and direct Ottoman rule that lasted in some areas from the fourteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Although Western European disdain for Turks subsided somewhat during Ottoman “westernization” campaigns of the Tanzimat Era (1839–1876), resistance to the oppressive “Ottoman yoke” spurred the Balkan nationalist movements and bloodshed of the nineteenth century.Footnote 55 In Bulgaria in particular, tensions persisted long after the downfall of Ottoman rule, and guest workers traveling on the E-5 in the 1980s did so in a climate in which Bulgaria’s communist government was engaged in a campaign of forced assimilation, expulsion, and ethnic cleansing against the country’s Muslim Turkish ethnic minority population.Footnote 56
These animosities assumed another layer during the Cold War. Socialism and communism in the Balkans contrasted with Turkey’s democracy and NATO membership, and the reality that guest workers were traveling from West Germany tied them further to the “West.” While they neither looked stereotypically German nor conversed primarily in the German language, the association reflected Cold War economic inequalities. The cars they drove were highly reputed Western brands (commonly BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, Audi, Opel, and Ford), and, when they exchanged money with local populations, they were identified not only by the materiality of their West German bills and coins, but also by their purchasing power. By contrast, access to Western consumer goods was rarer in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. Although some Yugoslavs were able to acquire such products – either through international trade, shopping trips to neighboring Italy, or gifts from vacationing Yugoslav guest workers – scarcities and their less valuable currency imbued Western products with a cachet of luxury.Footnote 57 Such products were even harder to obtain in Bulgaria, even though, as Theodora Dragostinova has shown, Bulgaria was a crucial actor on the global cultural scene.Footnote 58
Although both Yugoslavia and Bulgaria were far more entangled with the “West” than Cold War rhetoric has historically maintained, Turkish travelers envisioned the Balkans in terms of “Eastern” backwardness and underdevelopment. These lasting prejudices solidified due to their everyday encounters with local populations, which were marred by violence, bribery, and corruption. Yugoslavia, exclaimed the Turkish rap group Karakan in their song about the E-5, was “full of crooks.”Footnote 59 One guest worker, Cavit, complained that rowdy Yugoslav teenagers would scatter rocks along the highway to cause flat tires and then rob and vandalize the cars when the weary drivers pulled over for assistance.Footnote 60 Tensions also occurred with Yugoslav police officers and border guards, who had a sweet spot for bribes. When Zehrin’s husband made a dangerous turn into a gas station, the police arrested him, confiscated the family’s passports, demanded a fine of 520 DM, and refused to release him until he gave them his watch as a bribe.Footnote 61 Another traveler recalled “sadistic” border guards who, in search of contraband, forced her family to completely empty their car. Fortunately, she remembered poetically, “Sweets and cigarettes appeased the gods of the border, and my cheap red Walkman worked to make one-sided friendships.”Footnote 62 Avoiding conflict was easier for Erdoğan, whose mother had grown up in Sarajevo and could communicate with the border guards, but his family still stocked up on extra Marlboro cigarettes, Coca-Cola, and chocolate bars just in case.Footnote 63
For many travelers, driving through Bulgaria was even worse than Yugoslavia. One child admitted to not knowing much about politics, but he recalled vividly that his first impression of communism was the absence of color: everything was gray. The only color was on the building façades, which were adorned with ideological murals touting the benefits of communism by depicting happy young workers – a stark contrast to the depressing faces he saw on the streets.Footnote 64 An additional stressor for him were visa laws that permitted Turkish citizens a mere twelve hours to pass through the entire width of the country. If a policeman caught a car idling, he would not hesitate to tap on the driver’s window, grunting “komşu, komşu” (neighbor, neighbor), a Turkish word that had become part of the Bulgarian lexicon.Footnote 65 Bulgarian children, too, apparently had a taste for bribes and would tap on travelers’ windows demanding chocolate and cigarettes. When Cavit refused, the children cursed him: “I hope your mother and father die!”Footnote 66
The anxiety-provoking time in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, which confirmed guest workers’ preconceived distinctions between Western and Eastern Europe, did not entirely disappear when they crossed into Turkey. Far from a peaceful relief, the Bulgarian-Turkish border at Kapıkule was just as chaotic as the others they had crossed (Figure 2.3). The Turkish novelist Güney Dal described the scene in his 1979 book E-5: “German marks, Turkish lira; papers that have to be filled out and signed … exhaust fumes, dirt, loud yelling, police officers’ whistling, chaos, motor noises … pushing and shoving.”Footnote 67 Just like their Yugoslav and Bulgarian counterparts, Turkish border guards enriched themselves through bribery and extortion, and guest workers reported having to wait in hours-long lines of cars just to cross the border.Footnote 68 Murad rejoiced that his family was able to skip the lines because his uncle was the wealthy mayor of a local community.Footnote 69
Figure 2.3 Border guards inspect guest workers’ cars at the Bulgarian-Turkish border at Kapıkule, mid-1970s. The woman’s trunk is stuffed full of consumer goods, including a bag from the West German department store Hertie.
Despite the massive corruption, the Turkish media romanticized the treatment that guest workers received from Turkish border guards, compared to officials in the Balkans. In 1978, the Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet published an overly rosy portrayal of the Kapıkule border crossing. Guest workers are warmly welcomed by “cleanly dressed and smiling customs officials” and “friendly but cautious police officers,” who are “very courteous and take care of you.” The passport check and customs inspection proceed “quickly.” Upon crossing the border, guest workers encounter local villagers who “smile, say hello, and wave to one another.” The experience is so pleasant that the guest workers “are filled with pride”: “With an expansive joy in your heart, you say, ‘This is my home.’”Footnote 70 While this report certainly contradicted reality, its stark contrast to the long lines and corruption in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria supported a nationalist narrative that touted the supposed superiority of Turkish hospitality and efficiency.
The Cumhuriyet report was more accurate, however, in its portrayal of the “pride” and “expansive joy” after the physically and emotionally exhausting three-day journey. In the travelers’ recollections of the Kapıkule border crossing, complaints about corruption are overshadowed by happiness and relief. One child recalled the joyous cries of “Geldik!” (We’ve arrived!) as her family’s car crossed the border, which seemed “like a gate of paradise.”Footnote 71 Another woman explained: “When we drive over the border in Edirne, I feel very relieved. I don’t know why. Maybe because it’s my own country, or maybe it comes from the dirt or the water. It doesn’t matter which one. There is a saying: a bird locked in a golden cage is still in its homeland … No matter how bad it is.”Footnote 72 As a symbol of this feeling of relief and renewal, many guest workers kissed the ground, washed their cars, and enjoyed fresh watermelon.Footnote 73
Not all travelers, however, felt a sense of familiarity. For many children who had been born and raised in Germany, Turkey seemed just as strange as Yugoslavia and Bulgaria – at least the first time they encountered it – and they described it not as their “homeland” but rather as a “vacation country” (Urlaubsland). Though long regaled with their parents’ happy tales of Turkey, some children felt a sense of culture shock. “I thought everything was very ugly,” Fatma recalled, criticizing Turkey’s infrastructure as “wild” compared to Germany’s “standardized” and “orderly” urban planning. “The bridges were sometimes not high enough to drive under. The buildings were partially crumbling. As a child, I thought: ‘What is this place?’”Footnote 74 In Gülten Dayıoğlu’s 1986 book of short stories, a teenage boy expresses a similar sentiment: he derides his parents’ village as little more than “mud, dirt, and crumbling houses,” and he mocks the villagers for living “primitively” and being “stupid, backward, conservative, strange people.”Footnote 75 Even the guest worker generation, who had grown up in the villages, sometimes came to view their former neighbors with disdain. People who remained in the villages, they noted, were “dumb,” “ignorant,” “uneducated,” “uncultured,” “old-fashioned,” “rigid,” and even “crazy.”Footnote 76
This derision of Turkey’s shoddy infrastructure and villagers’ cultural “backwardness” reflects the power that the journey along the E-5 had in shaping the migrants’ identities. Their unsavory experiences driving through Yugoslavia and Bulgaria made them disdain life in the communist and socialist East and solidified their identification with the perceived freedom, democracy, modernity, and wealth of the West. By bribing Yugoslav and Bulgarian police officers and border guards with Marlboro cigarettes, Coca-Cola, and Deutschmarks, vacationing guest workers not only testified to the porosity of the Iron Curtain but also assumed small roles as purveyors of Western consumer goods in the Cold War’s underground economy. And some migrants, particularly children, transmuted their disdain for Yugoslavia and Bulgaria’s perceived economic underdevelopment onto their parents’ home villages, employing the same tropes of Turkish “backwardness” that West Germans used to condemn Turks as unable to integrate. The E-5 was not only paved with potholes, ice, and accidents, but also with paradoxes: while it transported the migrants to Turkey, it also solidified the West German part of their identity.
Fancy Cars and Suitcases Full of Deutschmarks
Like the journey itself, the happy reunions upon the guest workers’ arrival were also marked by new tensions of identity, national belonging, and cultural estrangement. Every year, as guest workers returned to their home villages, the friends and relatives they had left behind gradually detected that something about them had changed. These local-level perceptions of the migrants’ newfound difference soon crystallized into Turkish public discourse and became crucial to the development of discourses about the Almancı, or “Germanized Turks.” Visual depictions of the Almancı evolved with the changing demographics of migration. Whereas the depictions of the 1980s emphasized the forlorn faces of the second-generation children who had grown up abroad and could barely speak Turkish, those of the 1960s and early 1970s focused on the first generation, the guest workers themselves, usually portraying the average Almancı in similar fashion: as a mustachioed man in button-down shirt, vest, and work boots, donning a feathered fedora, and – more often than any other accessory – carrying a transistor radio.Footnote 77
The prevalence of the transistor radio in the images of the first-generation Almancı points to the important role that Western consumer goods played in delineating the shifting contours of Turkish and German identities in a globalizing world. First hitting American and Western European markets in 1954, transistor radios were among the most purchased electronic communication devices of the 1960s and 1970s and were widely popular among guest workers. In fact, up to 80 percent of guest workers chose transistor radios as their first purchase in West Germany. Promising access to Turkish-language broadcasts, transistor radios became the crucial means for staying apprised of news from home.Footnote 78 In Turkey, however, transistor radios came to symbolize not the migrants’ connection to their homeland but rather their estrangement from it. Here, vacations on the E-5 were critical, for they were the channel by which guest workers transported radios, along with cars and myriad other German-made consumer goods, to Turkey. The cars and consumer goods brought on the E-5 were a major factor influencing Turkish perceptions of guest workers’ Germanization: the Almancı, according to the stereotype, had transformed into nouveau-riche superfluous spenders who performed their wealth and status in the face of impoverished villagers.
The association of guest workers with Western consumer goods was rooted in broader economic trends. In the 1960s and 1970s, Turkish state planners’ import substitution industrialization policy, which aimed for industrialization with minimal outside influence, resulted in a largely closed economy in which foreign-made goods were rare.Footnote 79 Like Yugoslavs and Bulgarians, Turks often romanticized the variety and quality of Western European and American consumer goods compared to the allegedly inferior Turkish brands.Footnote 80 The divide was starker in villages, where the importance of local production and the absence of running water and electricity ensured that residents had virtually no exposure to emerging products like washing machines and refrigerators.Footnote 81 While villagers’ previous exposure to industrial products had come through internal seasonal labor migration to Turkish cities, vacationing guest workers brought a far more astounding array of products, and the label “Made in Germany” held more cachet than “Made in Istanbul.”Footnote 82
Since the start of the guest worker program in 1961, the Turkish government encouraged guest workers to import West German goods to Turkey as part of a larger policy of using remittances to stimulate the country’s economy.Footnote 83 Advertised lists of duty-free items reflected the variety of objects that guest workers brought back. In the 1960s, the category of “home furnishings” (ev eşyası) included pianos, dishwashers, radios, refrigerators, and washing machines, and “personal items” (zat eşyası) included fur coats, typewriters, handheld video recorders, cassette tapes, binoculars, gramophones, skis, tennis rackets, golf clubs, children’s toys, hunting rifles, and one liter of hard alcohol.Footnote 84 Reflecting the new sorts of goods popular in Germany, the 1982 list included handheld and stationary blenders, fruit juice pressers, grills, toasters, chicken fryers, coffee machines, yogurt-making machines, and electric massagers.Footnote 85 The number of duty-free items also diminished. Previously duty-free items, such as video cameras and washing machines, now cost up to 700 DM to import, and the minuscule half-Deutschmark tax on a single child’s sock or slipper reflected the government’s growing desperation for revenue amid economic crisis.
No consumer goods, however, were as significant as the cars that guest workers drove along the Europastraße 5. Amid Western Europe’s postwar industrialization, cars held great social meaning. As a 1960s travel guide for Germans traveling to Turkey put it, “The man of our days wants to be independent. For him, the car is not only a demonstration of his social position, but it is also the most comfortable form of transportation.”Footnote 86 Guest workers’ desire to purchase their own cars ran deeper, however. Psychologically, Der Spiegel insisted, cars were a “fetish” for all guest workers: “When Slavo in Sarajevo, Ali in Edirne, and Kostas in Corinth roll up with their own Ford, BMW, or even Mercedes, then the frustration of months on the assembly line in a foreign country turns into a pleasant experience of success in the homeland.”Footnote 87 Through their cars’ “modern” symbolism, the “scorned, mocked, and exploited pariahs of industrial society” could transcend their socioeconomic status, making their backbreaking labor worthwhile.
The cachet of guest workers’ cars was especially palpable in Turkey in the 1960s and 1970s, when car ownership was rare. The first Turkish sedan, the Devrim, was produced in 1961, the same year as the start of the guest worker program, and the first mass-produced Turkish car, the Anadol, did not begin production until 1966.Footnote 88 Whether purchasing an Anadol in Turkey or paying expensive taxes to import a car from abroad, the high cost of car ownership ensured that they were a luxury available only to wealthy urbanites. Even among the wealthy, however, the number of cars remained minuscule: for every 1,000 people in Turkey, there were only four cars in 1971 and, despite increasing, the number remained relatively low in 1977, at just ten per thousand.Footnote 89 The symbolic value of a car was especially pronounced in villages and smaller towns: while Turkish urbanites were familiar with cars by the late 1960s, most villagers had never seen a car with their own eyes until vacationing guest workers returned with them. In both cities and villages, Turks in the home country began to associate guest workers nearly synonymously with West German car brands: Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Volkswagen, Audi, and Opel. Incidentally, these were the same automotive firms where many guest workers were employed, and many took special pride in showing off a car that they had helped produce. Even if their cars were rickety, used beaters that had been sold multiple times and had broken brake lights, they became symbols of the guest workers’ upward mobility.
Family members, friends, and neighbors in Turkey reacted to guest workers’ cars with a mixture of awe, bewilderment, and envy. In the 1960s, twenty-year-old Necla even based her decision to marry her husband, Ünsal, on his car (Figure 2.4). Before their marriage, Necla knew nothing about Ünsal – only that he was from a small village five kilometers east of Şarköy, where she had grown up, and that he had become captivated with her when he caught a glimpse of her during his vacation from Germany. Although Necla’s father scrutinized potential suitors, he entertained Ünsal’s request for marriage simply because he was a guest worker. When Ünsal asked Necla’s father for her hand, her mother forced her to stay in her room, insisting that she should not see her suitor before the formal arrangement. Nervously awaiting Ünsal’s arrival, Necla peeked out the window and was delighted at what she saw. Although she could barely see Ünsal’s appearance from far away, one thing was certain: he had a car, a gray Mercedes-Benz. “That car had come to me like a fairy tale,” Necla gleefully recalled fifty years later. “All I knew was that he was a wealthy man and that he was working in Germany. I just had to marry him.”Footnote 90
Figure 2.4 Ünsal Ö., Necla’s husband, with his blue Opel – one of the eighteen cars that he bought and sold during his two decades living in West Germany before remigrating.
Guest workers also coveted cars as an additional income source. In 1963, Anadolu Gazetesi reported that 500 workers at the Ford factory in Cologne had purchased used cars to drive to Turkey to sell.Footnote 91 Selling West German cars in Turkey was so prevalent that the Turkish government instituted strict customs regulations to prevent competition with the emerging Turkish automotive market. In 1973, Turkish citizens who had worked in West Germany for at least two years could import one small- or medium-sized passenger vehicle – but only upon their permanent remigration. Within six months of their arrival, the returning workers had to register their cars to ensure they had a valid Turkish driver’s license. Although they could import a tractor for farming, they were restricted to a list of twenty-one “permitted tractor brands,” including Massey Ferguson, Ford, Caterpillar, and John Deere, and the duty-free import of trucks, vans, buses, and minibuses was “strictly forbidden.”Footnote 92 Circumventing these restrictions, guest workers regularly sold cars on the black market.Footnote 93 During their thirty years in Germany, Necla and Ünsal purchased eighteen used cars, most of which they sold for cash in Turkey.
Cars were not only modes of transportation, status symbols, and income generators, but also vessels for transporting other consumer goods. Personal vehicles’ capacity for mass quantities of luggage was a major factor motivating the decision to drive rather than fly to Turkey, compared to airlines’ harsh baggage restrictions. One guest worker had even offered a 100 DM bribe to a baggage handler at the Düsseldorf airport to load his massively overweight suitcase onto the plane. To his dismay, however, bribes were far less successful at German airports than they were at Yugoslav, Bulgarian, and Turkish border checkpoints: an airport official wrote a formal letter of complaint to his employer, which was forwarded to the state and federal government transportation ministries.Footnote 94 The importance of cars’ capacity for luggage is captured in vacationing guest workers’ family photographs, which depict lines and lines of cars on the Europastraße 5 filled to the brim, complete with carefully tied-down rooftop luggage racks.Footnote 95 Güney Dal’s 1979 novel E-5 even features a curious subplot involving a blue porcelain bathtub tied to the roof of a car.Footnote 96 After the rise in family migration in the 1970s, guest workers deliberately opted for cars that could hold not only large quantities of luggage but also large families. The Ford Transit, a sturdy and spacious minibus first produced in 1965, became such an iconic symbol of the guest worker program that the German city of Bremen erected a statue of it in 2017 (Figure 2.5).Footnote 97
Figure 2.5 Turkish vacationers at a rest stop on the E-5 in Austria, ca. 1970. Their car, an iconic Ford Transit, is loaded to the brim with consumer goods, including a rooftop luggage rack.
Well aware that vacationing guest workers were loading up their cars with consumer goods, West German firms sought to take advantage of the phenomenon. In the 1960s, supermarkets and textile stores in West German cities began hiring translators to accommodate the large number of Turkish customers.Footnote 98 Local stores also advertised in newspapers oriented toward guest workers. The Frankfurt-based retailer Radio City, the self-identified “oldest and best-known Turkish firm in Germany,” boasted that its inventory included well-regarded companies, such as Grundig, Telefunken, Philips, and Siemens, that employed guest workers.Footnote 99 In the most blatant example of ethno-marketing toward Turks, the home improvement and construction store OBI, located in Berlin’s heavily Turkish district of Neukölln, distributed a Turkish-language flyer advertising special deals on auto equipment necessary for the drive along the E-5, including hydraulic car jacks, water pumps, and rooftop luggage racks (Figure 2.6). The ad featured a Turkish woman wearing a headscarf, shouting: “Run, run! Don’t miss the deals at OBI!”Footnote 100
Figure 2.6 Turkish-language ethno-marketing flyer from the West German home improvement store OBI, advertising auto parts and rooftop luggage racks to vacationing guest workers, mid-1970s. The woman, wearing a headscarf, shouts: “Run, run, don’t miss the deals at OBI!.”
While the OBI advertisement certainly exaggerated the haste of running to catch deals, it did capture the importance that guest workers placed on shopping before their vacations. Given stereotypes about guest workers’ riches, friends and relatives in Turkey expected to receive not only hugs and kisses but also gifts and souvenirs. The sheer pressure of pleasing relatives – and of not being perceived as poor, unsuccessful, or stingy – turned shopping into an annual ritual, and guest workers put extensive planning, effort, and expense into purchasing gifts. Birgül explained that her mother would take several days off work before the vacation to complete the shopping. “Everyone wants something from Germany because they think that the things here are much nicer,” she explained. At department stores, Turkish women would shop for dresses, skirts, blouses, shoes, and bed linens, while men generally assumed responsibility for larger items, such as radios, vacuums, and appliances. To introduce her friends to the latest fashions, Birgül brought lipstick, mascara, and nail polish, as well as copies of the magazines Burda, Brigitte, and Petra. Polaroid cameras, too, were hot items. Birgül recalled excitedly that when her father photographed villagers in Çorum and the prints came out, “They thought it was a miracle!”Footnote 101
Guest workers who were interviewed for this book confirmed this broad and oddly specific range of items. “Oh, we brought everything!” exclaimed Necla, the same woman who had married her husband because of his car.Footnote 102 Necla’s list contained small items, such as beauty products and cosmetics, as well as furniture, such as chairs, cabinets, and a television, even though her village did not yet have a broadcasting connection. Above all, however, Necla coveted cookware. She brought plates, pots, and pans, including a multi-piece American set of pots and pans with a 100-year warranty that she was still using as of 2016. Burcu, who was a child while Necla and Ünsal were traveling back and forth between the two countries, remembered Necla’s beautiful silver knife set even thirty years later, reminiscing, “I always loved those knives.” Burcu would also get excited when “Necla Teyze” (Auntie Necla) would bring her special presents, such as balloons – since Necla worked at a balloon factory in Dortmund – and even her first Barbie doll.Footnote 103
“Suitcase children,” who lived with relatives in Turkey and traveled to West Germany to visit their parents, also transported goods between the two countries. Bengü’s grandparents packed her suitcase with Turkish culinary staples like chili paste, garlic, olive oil, and dried okra, which were hard to find in Germany before the rise in Turkish markets and export stores established by former guest workers.Footnote 104 The only downside, she laughed, was that her clothes frequently smelled like garlic. Murad spoke fondly of transporting products on the other leg of the journey – from Germany to Turkey – which elevated his social status. “Turkey was like a socialist country back then,” he joked, elaborating that Turkey’s relatively closed trade policies made foreign products rare.Footnote 105 While his uncles asked for cigarettes and alcohol from the German airport’s duty-free store, his classmates demanded sweets: “Bringing chocolates was like gold!” With its Italian origins, the chocolate hazelnut spread Nutella made Murad especially “popular,” while Bengü’s classmates delighted in Switzerland’s Nesquik chocolate powder.
The West German media was curiously fixated on the shopping and “show-and-tell” at these reunions, emphasizing how guest workers – often arrogantly – performed their wealth and status. While newspapers mentioned vacationing guest workers, they focused on individuals who had remigrated permanently because it was then, when a guest worker had all his German-made possessions centralized in his village, that he could fully flaunt his wealth. In 1976, Zeit-Magazin reported on Ahmet Üstünel, a thirty-year-old farmer who had returned to Gülünce after mining coal for five years in Oberhausen. He brought not only his wife and three children but also 30,000 DM (actually 28,509 DM and 33 pfennigs, per his meticulous calculations) saved through thrifty budgeting. Üstünel also owned not one, but two, vehicles: a brand-new McCormick 624 diesel tractor and the fully packed Volkswagen Variant. The shiny car, washed clean after the arduous three-day journey on the E-5 and boasting a West German license plate, attracted villagers’ awe and envy. As he drove past a local coffee shop, a group of children chased him down the street, hoping for treats. “Cigarette! Cigarette!” they yelled.Footnote 106
In a more comprehensive five-page article and photo series, titled “What Turks Do With Their Marks,” the West German magazine Quick profiled ten guest workers who had returned “from the golden West” and were now viewed enviously as “capitalists” and “little kings.”Footnote 107 Rather than praising the guest workers for achieving their dreams, the article belittled their frivolousness and naiveté in contrast to Germans’ allegedly wise and prudent financial decisions. Jusuf Demir, who had spent three years as a garbage truck driver in Langenfeld, smiled widely for a photograph to show off his shiny new gold teeth – “a good investment,” the article joked. The article further mocked Hursit Altınday, a former construction worker, for having built a “Swabian paradise on the Anatolian highlands,” complete with “German” features, like a bathroom, balcony, garden, and wrought-iron railing. The article also marveled at guest workers who leveraged their wealth to secure positions in local government, implicitly criticizing Turkish politics as nepotistic. One striking example was İbrahim Öksüz, who upon returning from Wuppertal with 100,000 DM, had been elected to the Şereflikoçhisar town council and was planning to run for a seat in the parliament. But “nobody was as generous as Bünyamin Çelebi,” the article continued, who used his savings to build a 125-foot minaret and was “promptly” elected mayor.
Disparaging media reports also often highlighted the negative consequences of the displays of wealth. In 1971, a fourteen-page Der Spiegel article on guest workers’ vacations reported the emergence of Turkish discourses lambasting guest workers as extravagant spenders who squandered their hard-earned savings on items that were often entirely useless in the hinterlands of Anatolia, where electricity first arrived in the 1980s. “No one knows what to do with a camera and typewriter, so they are sold,” the newspaper wrote. “The electric razor is buried at the bottom of a cabinet – until one distant day, when [the guest worker] returns or his four-year-old son sprouts his beard.”Footnote 108 Even The Sunday Times, a British newspaper with no direct connection to the issue, condemned the “waste of the skilled men who return home”: “Other than a smattering of German and perhaps the money to buy or build a house, possibly a German car or even a German wife, the vast majority have little to show for five to ten years spent in one of the world’s most affluent countries.”Footnote 109 In short, guest workers had filled their homes with fancy stuff that had little other purpose than to collect dust.
Although laden with stereotypes and exaggerations, these media accounts were rooted in reality. In 1971, the same year as the Der Spiegel feature, a governor of the Anatolian province of Cappadocia told a visiting West German official that migration had destroyed local economic life. Not only had it drained the villages of able-bodied workers, male protectors, and individuals able to participate in government, but it had also wrought no economic benefits. “Most of the workers come back without money,” the governor complained. “They just spend it on frivolous things, such as cars, television sets, etc., or even items that do not correspond to their current standard of living and cannot at all be financed by them.” In such cases, the items were sold or abandoned because they could not build or purchase replacement parts. The governor implored the West German official to “advise the workers in Germany to bring such items that can be used for the building of new and income-generating activity,” such as tools and equipment.Footnote 110
Such pleas proved fruitless, however. Nermin Abadan-Unat’s 1975 survey of 500 returning workers in two small Turkish villages confirmed the governor’s complaint that they were not bringing back “useful” items.Footnote 111 Nearly two-thirds brought clothing, tape recorders, and radios, while only 1 percent – a mere seven of the 500 surveyed workers – brought professional tools. One man built himself a five-bedroom house, by far the biggest in the village, which could fit his wife and five children, his son’s wife, and his two grandchildren. While most villagers had austere decor, he adorned his guest room with “modern urban business furniture” and filled the home with accessories: two electric blankets, two lamps, a blender, an electric knife sharpener, five or six clocks, a vacuum, cups and mugs displayed in a grand showcase, a large kitchen table, a washing machine, a food compressor, a tanning bed to provide relief from rheumatism, and – most curiously – a single plastic Christmas ornament hanging from the ceiling. Despite having no electricity, he placed a refrigerator in his bedroom and stored clothing on its shelves.
This conspicuous consumption, which the survey’s researchers called “gaudy” and “superfluous,” was especially offensive not only because its overt ostentation highlighted villages’ wealth disparities, but also because it testified to the migrants’ abandonment of the rural values of hospitality and austerity amid poverty.Footnote 112 At a time when even the poorest families “were suffering for the sake of hospitality” – offering guests refreshments like sugar, perfume, food, tea, and coffee – guest workers spent their money recklessly and ostentatiously. Yet it was not entirely the workers’ fault, the researchers explained: “Workers in foreign countries are accustomed to societies with excessive spending habits. As they walk along the street in the evenings, they are confronted with all kinds of advertisements and shop windows. In these countries, luxury furniture and necessities are exhibited and promoted. On the other hand, to sell to the foreign workers, the owners of stores and shops in these countries also have a tendency to exploit them, even to appeal to their chauvinistic thoughts.” Tantalized by the array of products available at lower prices and buoyed by their higher wages, guest workers “fall into the trap.”Footnote 113
Although the researchers associated these excessive spending habits with the capitalist values of “foreign countries,” both the guest workers and their neighbors described it as a peculiarly German problem. “I’ve been injected with a German sickness. I always want more,” admitted one guest worker, who despite already owning multiple lavish properties in his village planned to open a huge shopping center modeled after the German department store Hertie.Footnote 114 Defensively, another guest worker attributed his spending habits to a broader sense of adopting German culture. “The workers here are slowly beginning to live like Germans,” he contended. “They do not want to live in old houses. Everyone wants to live in a civilized manner, not to work like a machine. Like people. As a result, our spending has increased. Isn’t that our right?”Footnote 115 This praise for “civilized” life in Germany and denigration of “old houses” in Turkish villages, alongside the bold assertation that guest workers were “slowly beginning to live like Germans,” struck precisely at the heart of the issue: after years abroad, guest workers, too, were well aware of their gradual estrangement from Turkish villages and, by proxy, from the Turkish nation. Even if they rejected the derogatory label Almancı, they – to a certain extent – were willing to acknowledge, and even embrace, the notion that they had Germanized.
*****
At age eighty, reflecting on his many years of road trips along the E-5, Cengiz was emphatic: never again would he endure the “crazy” journey, “even if someone offered me 10,000 Euros!”Footnote 116 Fortunately, as for the vast majority of guest workers, Cengiz’s last drive on the E-5 was in the mid-1980s, a time when the significance of the E-5 declined markedly due to the increased expansion, affordability, and convenience of air travel. As Turkey opened its economy to foreign influences in the 1980s, investment in the Turkish tourism industry skyrocketed, and the number of foreign tourists visiting from Germany rose by 12.5 percent annually between 1980 and 1987. By 1994, one-quarter of all tourists visiting Turkey were German.Footnote 117 Competition among firms in the expanding West German and Turkish tourism markets lowered prices and democratized air travel, transforming it from a privilege of the wealthy elite into one that could be enjoyed even by guest worker families. With nonstop flights from Frankfurt to Istanbul taking just four hours compared to three exhausting and dangerous days on the E-5, the preference was clear for many. The long road home had become much shorter, and the Cold War buffer zone had turned into a flyover zone.
Guest workers’ reasons for traveling to Turkey also changed in the 1980s. They increasingly vacationed to Turkey not only to visit relatives but also, as Germans did, to sightsee and take cruises. As one guest worker remarked, “If you want to take a vacation in another country, you would have to pay three to five times as much.” His “pockets full of Deutschmarks,” he added, allowed his family to enjoy much nicer vacations than most Turks could ever imagine.Footnote 118 The number of Turkish tourism firms in Germany also grew markedly, many of them founded by entrepreneurial former guest workers. By 1987, one of the largest was AS-Sonnenreisen, which was founded by Sümer Akat, a former Volkswagen and Ford factory employee, who had begun organizing flights for Turkish mineworkers and later expanded to include German tourists. Just two decades after his menial labor as a guest worker, Akat’s initiative in anticipating the lucrative new market had allowed him to manage 300 employees, several Turkish hotels, and his own airline with regular flights from Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Munich to Istanbul, Izmir, Dalaman, and Antalya.Footnote 119
By the late 1980s, the fixation on guest workers’ cars and consumer goods declined in importance as the Turkish government overhauled the country’s macroeconomic system. Not only had guest workers’ friends and families become accustomed to the consumer goods they had brought back over the past two decades, but Turkey’s neoliberal external economic reorientation of the 1980s, which vastly reduced import duties, made foreign products available to a broader stratum of Turkish society.Footnote 120 The migrants recalled that the products they brought with them no longer had the same social cachet. The highly coveted Coca-Cola bottles and Nutella chocolate spread that Murad brought to Istanbul were now available in Turkish stores and no longer made him as “popular” as they had before. And as the economic reforms bridged the rural–urban divide by bringing running water and electricity to even the most remote parts of Anatolia, items like refrigerators, dishwashers, and electric chicken fryers no longer inspired the same awe.
If the rise of the airline and tourism industries marked the first death knells of the road trip, the post–Cold War upheaval cemented it in its grave. Travel across the E-5 was abruptly cut off upon the 1991 outbreak of the Yugoslav Wars, which made the stretch from Zagreb to Belgrade impassable. In the words of one British newspaper, the ironically named “Road of Fraternity and Unity” had transformed into little more than “a deserted concrete strip between the two capitals used only by United Nation peacekeeping convoys.”Footnote 121 Guest workers corroborated this claim, explaining that the chaos in Yugoslavia forced them to fly rather than drive.Footnote 122 Following the cessation of the fighting, the portion of the E-5 spanning from Salzburg to Thessaloniki through Ljubliana, Zagreb, Belgrade, and Skopje was reconstructed and incorporated into the Pan-European Corridor system, which the European Union devised in the mid-1990s as part of its efforts to draw southern and eastern European countries into the growing supranational transport network, as “Corridor X.”Footnote 123 A highway named “E-5” continues to exist, though related to the original one in name only. As part of the United Nations international E-road network, it spans north–south from Scotland to Algeciras through England and western France.Footnote 124
Despite these developments, the notion that guest workers had transformed into a nouveau-riche class of spenders out of touch with village needs remained permanently ingrained in discourses surrounding the culturally estranged Almancı, or Germanized Turks – so much so that condemnation of guest workers replaced sympathy for them. As one West German news report put it, “Anyone who counts the number of minivans with German license plates on Turkish streets will no longer want to hear that the passengers were ‘sacrificed’ for the German economic miracle.”Footnote 125 Although performances of wealth and status often belied the reality that guest workers were struggling financially in West Germany, the consequences of these discourses were both concrete and lasting. One man who returned to Turkey in the 1980s explained that villagers still charged him higher prices because “they think our pockets are full.”Footnote 126 When he went to a mechanic to repair his car, he was charged 4,000 lira – twice the usual price – simply because it was a German car. The overcharging was so rampant that one woman tried to hide the fact that she had worked in Germany even decades later.Footnote 127 Yet the secret was out: her Almancı identity was inescapable, and neighbors continued to gossip behind her back. Vacations across Cold War Europe – with all their twists, turns, and bottlenecks – not only physically brought the guest workers closer to Turkey, but also widened the emotional distance from “home.”
Even more so than annual vacations, the “final return” to Turkey was expensive. Not only did returning migrants have to finance the moving costs themselves, but they also had to secure housing and find a new job. After years of toiling in West German factories and mines, and wary of Turkey’s high unemployment rate, they generally wished to become their own bosses. But, despite performing their wealth and status, they often struggled to afford the high start-up costs of entrepreneurship. Alongside pooling money from friends and relatives, some sought governmental assistance. In 1976, Hüseyin Şen asked the West German government for a “small loan” of 100,000 DM, explaining that he had purchased a fifteen-acre plot of land that could fit forty cows, and he had already transported five cows and a bull from Germany to Turkey. “If you would give me this opportunity,” Şen promised, “I am ready to leave Germany and return to Turkey forever.”Footnote 1 Levent Mercan, who had spent one of his vacations purchasing an acre for cattle rearing, had a similar request – albeit for far less money.Footnote 2 Nesip Aslan tried his luck in the industrial sector, seeking a loan to build an electrical power plant in rural Hatay.Footnote 3 None of these men, however, received a response. Abandoned in the bureaucratic black hole, they were left to fend for themselves.
Failing to respond, however, did not mean that the Turkish and West German governments were not interested in guest workers’ return migration, nor did it signal a lack of interest in how guest workers spent their money. On the contrary, the connection between return migration and financial investments dominated bilateral discussions at the time. In the early 1970s, as part of a broader effort to determine how to send the Turks home, West German officials attempted to implement a bilateral program that would pay Turkey millions of Deutschmarks in development aid in exchange for assistance in reintegrating returning migrants who were interested in starting their own small businesses in Turkey. At first, the West German government had every reason to believe that Turkey would be amenable to such a program. After all, as Brian J. K. Miller has extensively documented, Turkey initially claimed to welcome the guest workers’ return on the basis that they would bring new knowledge and skills to spark their home country’s internal economic development and modernization.Footnote 4 By the 1970s, however, the Turkish government switched its stance and began opposing guest workers’ return. As West German officials decried in 1984, “The Turkish government wants to avoid everything that could intensify the reverse flow of Turkish citizens.”Footnote 5
The reason for Turkey’s newfound opposition to return migration, as this chapter shows, was primarily financial. Just as the exigencies of global labor markets sparked guest workers’ recruitment to Germany, so too was the tense question of their return enmeshed in economic forces beyond their control. The 1970s, the decade when West Germany first devised policies to promote guest workers’ return migration, marked the highpoint of neoliberalism and the globalization of international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.Footnote 6 Turkey’s relationship to the global economy was volatile, however. Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, Turkey’s official policy of import substitution industrialization had yielded steady economic growth, particularly in the nascent manufacturing and industrial sectors that the government prioritized.Footnote 7 But the OPEC oil crisis of 1973 spiraled Turkey into years of unemployment, hyperinflation, parliamentary instability, and political violence.Footnote 8 The government’s excessive borrowing from international institutions and foreign countries exacerbated the problem, ultimately leading to the 1980 military coup. The situation remained dire until the mid-1980s, when democratically elected Prime Minister Turgut Özal, a neoliberal-minded former World Bank employee, overhauled the public sector, privatized firms, and promoted exports.Footnote 9
As part of their broader impact on their home country, guest workers played a significant role in mitigating Turkey’s economic crisis. To repay its foreign debt, Turkey became increasingly dependent on guest workers’ remittance payments in high-performing Deutschmarks, which were far more valuable than the Turkish lira. Among migrants, this was no secret. The renowned Turkish novelist Bekir Yıldız, who had returned to Turkey after a four-year stint as a guest worker in Heidelberg, satirized the home country’s views in his 1974 novel Alman Ekmeği (German Bread):
Give up eating, Ahmets. Give up eating, Jales. Load your stuff on trains, Osmans and Ayşes … Fly home with your marks … Buy land in our big cities … Buy stocks and shares in new factories. When you return, you could become industrialists. What’s wrong with that?Footnote 10
Turkey’s need for investment was so severe, Yıldız insisted, that the Turkish government expected them to put all their Deutschmarks toward farming, industrial production, and the stock market – even if that forced them to “give up eating” in the process. But Yıldız’s satire went further: despite rhetoric promising guest workers the chance of future economic success in Turkey, the Turkish government did not, in fact, want them to return.
To be sure, this dependence on remittances was a pattern that prevailed in many other cases of labor migration across the globe.Footnote 11 But the Turkish-German case stands out because of the timing: the late 1970s, the time when remittance payments became especially crucial, was the very same moment that they starkly declined, since guest workers who had brought their families to Germany had less need to send money home. On the flip side, the Turkish government knew that if guest workers returned to Turkey, the stream of Deutschmarks would dry up even more. This realization, alongside fears of returning guest workers inundating the labor market, made their return a nightmarish prospect. Even when it contradicted guest workers’ best interests, and even when it created bilateral tensions with the West German government, officials in Ankara strove to prevent a mass return migration at all costs.
Although both countries’ governments treated them like pawns on the chessboard of global finance, the migrants strategically navigated the dual pressures from above. They sent remittances home, invested in Turkish industry, and placed their savings in Turkish banks – but they did so on their own terms, when it suited their own wallets rather than Turkey’s federal coffers. And they vocally pushed back against Turkey’s blatant efforts to expropriate their Deutschmarks, with guest workers’ children even initiating an activist movement throughout West Germany to protest the exorbitant cost of paying their way out of Turkey’s mandatory military service in the 1980s. Overall, the knowledge that they were not only unwanted in Germany, but also in Turkey, whose government wanted to prevent them from returning at all costs, widened the rift between the migrants and their home country. Increasingly mistrustful of the Turkish government, the migrants lamented that their home country viewed them not only as “Germanized” Almancı but also as “remittance machines” (döviz makinesi), who posed the least risk and greatest reward to the nation if they kept their physical bodies far away but their Deutschmarks close.Footnote 12 Although they remained tied to the nation, their own government valued them not for their physical presence in their homeland, but rather for the economic benefits reaped on account of their absence.
Development Aid for Return Migration
In the early 1970s, just one decade after initially welcoming Turks as guest workers, the West German government began strategizing about how to send them home. Multiple factors underlay this shift. The economy had vastly improved throughout the 1960s, and, despite guest workers’ significant contributions to Germany’s postwar “economic miracle,” many West Germans praised their own initiative and failed to acknowledge the guest workers’ role. The German population had also restabilized, as rising birthrates helped make up for wartime deaths and alleviated the shortage of able-bodied men. As this new generation of Germans reached adulthood and began entering the labor market in the late 1960s, and as German women increasingly began working outside the home, guest workers were no longer perceived as necessary. Growing condemnation of guest workers “taking the jobs” of Germans – though far less egregious than in the 1980s – both reflected and fueled rising anti-Turkish racism. For West Germany, as for the Turkish government, guest workers represented a financial threat, albeit of a different kind.
West Germany’s evolving solutions to the so-called “Turkish problem,” both in the 1970s and 1980s, rested on one core premise: financial incentives for return migration. Whereas in the 1980s the West German government would directly – and controversially – pay individual guest workers to leave, in the 1970s they initially attempted to work bilaterally with the Turkish government to indirectly incentivize guest workers’ return. Throughout the 1970s, officials at the West German Foreign Office and the Federal Ministry for Economic Development and Cooperation (BMZ) worked tirelessly to convince the Turkish government to cooperate on programs that would promote guest workers’ return under the umbrella of “development aid” (Entwicklungshilfe) to Turkey. West Germany’s basic idea was simple: by improving the Turkish economy through development aid, and by giving jointly administered financial assistance to individual guest workers who wanted to start their own small businesses, they could convince them to leave.Footnote 13 As Matthew Sohm has compellingly argued, tying Turkish return migration to development aid was also part of West Germany’s broader strategy of managing the crises of the 1970s and 1980s by “offloading” perceived domestic problems onto countries in the southern European periphery.Footnote 14
Offering development aid to Turkey served not only the goals of domestic policy, but also its Cold War geopolitical goals. In 1961, the same year as the start of the Turkish-German guest worker program, the West German government had institutionalized its newfound commitment to “Third World” development aid in the establishment of the BMZ. While policymakers genuinely believed in supporting these countries’ “modernization,” they also aimed to jockey for global influence against their East German rival, which had already begun an extensive development aid program the previous decade.Footnote 15 Strategically positioned as a “bridge” between communist Eastern Europe and the oil-rich Middle East, Turkey was especially important to this strategy. Although its 1952 NATO membership aligned it formally with the “First World,” and although Turkey’s accession to the EEC was a realistic possibility, the BMZ’s classification of Turkey as “Third World” reflected West Germans’ core belief – bolstered by their impressions of rural guest workers’ difficulties integrating into West Germany’s modern industrial society – in Turkey’s “backwardness.”
West Germany had been giving Turkey development aid since 1958, but their attempt to tie the funds to guest workers’ return migration began in late 1969, when the BMZ asked the German Confederation of Trade Unions (DGB) to help develop a training program to incentivize guest workers’ return.Footnote 16 The DGB was instrumental to such a program because trade unions, which represented workers of all nationalities in West Germany, were among the key institutions with close formal ties to guest workers. Coordinated by West Germany’s International Federation for Social Work, one of whose board members worked for the DGB, the program solicited guest workers who wished to become mechanics or electricians in Turkey. After completing a twelve-month course, the participants would relocate to Turkey, where they would attend a two-month training course organized by the Turkish government and then search for a job or start their own business. Most enticingly, participants would enjoy a monthly stipend of 150 DM, plus 600 DM if their family returned with them.Footnote 17 But there was a catch: they had to remain in Turkey. Violating their signed “commitment to return” agreement would result in an enormous fine of 20,000 DM.
The program was exclusively oriented toward guest workers from Turkey, not only because they were the largest guest worker nationality, but also because West Germany had strong diplomatic relations with Turkey and assumed that Turkey was still eager to embrace guest workers’ return. As the organizers put it, “in negotiations in Turkey – in comparison to other countries – one can expect the fewest political hindrances.”Footnote 18 This optimism, however, was severely misguided. For over a decade, the Turkish government continually frustrated the BMZ with its refusal to cooperate – even when it contradicted the guest workers’ best interests. As one official noted with dismay, West Germany was apparently striving to “represent the interests of the Turkish guest workers more strongly than their own government.”Footnote 19
Ede Şevki was one of the hundreds of guest workers who applied for the pilot program in 1972. For him, like for many guest workers, the “final return” was not a far-off illusion, but rather a plan that he aimed to put into practice. Hoping to return to Istanbul to open his own auto repair shop, he boldly inquired as to the “exact” amount of money he would receive.Footnote 20 He was also enticed by the program’s colorful Turkish-language advertisements, which depicted men listening to lectures while looking at mathematical equations on a chalkboard, drafting mechanical schematics with protractors, and wearing smart-looking glasses while supervising the factory floor.Footnote 21 The message of professional advancement was simple: joining the program would help them become their own bosses rather than mere peons. Although the translator of Şevki’s Turkish-language application letter was impressed that his vocabulary and grammar were at an “exceptionally high level (for a guest worker),” the program had attracted such a large applicant pool that Şevki was not chosen. In fact, organizers were surprised to encounter over 600 potential applicants, whom they praised as “intelligent,” “eager to learn,” and “goal-oriented.”Footnote 22 Many of the applicants’ interest in West German assistance, they further reported, stemmed from their “deep mistrust of their own government,” which just months before had undergone the 1971 military coup.
Guest workers’ experiences of the training program, however, actually intensified their mistrust of the Turkish government. Soon after its inception, the program began to crumble. By May 1972, fifty participants were enrolled in programs in Nuremberg, Cologne, and Frankfurt.Footnote 23 Yet, with just two weeks before the Nuremberg trainees’ graduation ceremony and scheduled departure for Turkey, details surrounding Turkey’s portion of the training program were still unclear. One West German organizer described the program as “still up in the air,” with “all questions open.” Despite extensive conversations with the Turkish Ministry of Culture and the Turkish Planning Office, he still had no idea “where, when, and how the training courses planned in Turkey would take place.” Turkey, he concluded, had “no interest at all” in the program and, by extension, no interest in assisting returning workers. Rather than ensuring their smooth reintegration into Turkey’s economy, Turkey was treating its own citizens like “guinea pigs.”Footnote 24 As Bundestag Vice President Carlo Schmid complained, “I am very troubled by the thought that this useful program, which was initially off to a good start, could fail at the intractability of several subordinate authorities in Turkey.”Footnote 25 In the words of one German bureaucrat, “These Turks feel that they have been cheated and ditched by the Turkish government.”Footnote 26
Despite these difficulties, the two countries agreed to a broader implementation of the program in the December 7, 1972, Treaty of Ankara. Based on the “friendly relations between both countries and their peoples,” the treaty aimed to “promote economic and social progress in Turkey” by capitalizing on the guest workers’ newly acquired “knowledge and skills.”Footnote 27 Overseen by a joint committee and funded primarily by West Germany, the project operated on what BMZ officials called the “individual support model”: providing funding to the Turkish government, which in turn would support individual returning workers. While this model resembled the pilot program in terms of structure and educational content, it offered increased financial incentives to participants who were interested in starting their own firms in Turkey, including start-up cash, low-interest loans, tax credits, subsidies for materials, and business advice.
The original purpose of the 1972 treaty, as predicated on the individual support model, never materialized. In a 1977 evaluation, BMZ officials complained that Turkey’s failure to follow through with the “unmistakable and detailed provisions” owed not to a lack of funding but to the government’s “deep-seated indifference to promoting return migration.”Footnote 28 Still, this “indifference,” which BMZ officials later sheepishly realized was a vehement “hostility” to return migration, did not impede Turkey from milking the West German government for millions of Deutschmarks in development aid. Through its heavy-handed negotiation skills and opposition to the individual support model, Turkish officials manipulated the flexibility of the 1972 Treaty of Ankara to convince the West German government to redirect funds earmarked for the program toward their main goal: receiving development aid without an influx of returning guest workers.
In negotiations, Turkish economic planners made it clear that supporting the small businesses of individual returning guest workers who dreamt of owning their own farms, opening local grocery stores, or working as taxi drivers was simply not a macroeconomic priority. Instead, they sought to redirect the development aid toward the financing of large infrastructure projects in the energy, transportation, and urban planning sectors.Footnote 29 Specific plans included the construction of the Istanbul subway system and the Atatürk Dam on the Euphrates River, as well as the maintenance of the Bosphorus Bridge connecting the European and Asian sides of Istanbul.Footnote 30 Reflecting the Turkish government’s disconnect from the needs of its citizens abroad, one guest worker complained: “The people say, why a bridge? Instead, they could be building factories so that the people have work … This is a capitalist government that does little for the workers.”Footnote 31
While Turkish officials failed to convince West Germany that supporting major infrastructure projects would indirectly convince guest workers to return, there was one approach upon which the two countries could compromise: the financing of Turkish Workers Collectives (TANGs). Founded on the self-help initiative of groups of guest workers in West Germany, these collectives were joint-stock companies that provided individual guest workers the opportunity to purchase stock in a new firm to be established in Turkey, usually in the agrarian regions from which they came. Guest workers’ primary motivation was financial. They wished to secure a job in anticipation of their eventual return to Turkey, reap income from dividends, and compensate for their inability to finance their own individual large investments by jointly purchasing stocks. But, as Turkish sociologist Faruk Şen revealed in his extensive 1980 study of the Workers Collectives, there was also an emotional motivation: investing in the development of their home communities was a means of making a contribution or giving back (Figure 3.1).Footnote 32
Figure 3.1 A vacationing guest worker in a pristine suit stands in front of straw-roofed houses in his impoverished home village, representing guest workers’ desire to help Turkey’s economic development and modernization, 1970.
The first Workers Collective, Türksan, was founded in December 1966, when a small group of Turkish guest workers living in Cologne gathered in a sports hall and pitched a promising business plan to 2,800 of their colleagues. After pooling their savings, the guest workers would become shareholders in the soon-to-be established industrial firms in Turkey and, upon their return, they would be first in line for jobs. The plan attracted widespread interest. By 1971, thousands of guest workers had invested a total of twenty million DM in Türksan. The company had purchased several plots of land to sell for profit and had opened a wallpaper factory near Istanbul (although, as one West German consular official joked in a pejorative comment on Turkey’s underdevelopment, “Who there needs wallpaper?!”). Türksan also planned several schemes to address guest worker families’ unique needs: a tourism business offering charter flights for vacationing workers, and grocery stores and duty-free shops for Turks abroad.Footnote 33
Reports on Türksan’s success spurred guest workers’ enthusiasm for investing in other collectives. İbrahim Karakaya, who had worked in Bremen for eight years, was intrigued when he received a letter in 1972 from Örgi-Aktiengesellschaft, a Workers Collective in the Central Anatolian province of Nevşehir. The collective planned to open a textile factory in Kalaba, seven miles from his home village, and asked him to contribute some capital. The offer proved enticing, as Karakaya’s prior attempt to start a delivery business in Turkey with a used truck he had bought in Germany had embarrassingly flopped. Eager to make passive income before attempting to establish another potentially unsuccessful business, Karakaya invested 3,000 DM in the collective, paying one-quarter upfront, and he continued to invest more over the years.Footnote 34
While West Germany reluctantly accepted Workers Collectives as the only viable alternative to their prized individual support model, Turkey embraced them. The 1973 platform of Bülent Ecevit’s victorious Republican People’s Party (CHP) named Workers Collectives as part of its new “people’s sector” (halk sektörü) ideology, by which the state would promote economic organization carried out by “individuals and small groups that normally have no possibility to invest.”Footnote 35 In a television interview years later, Ecevit even publicly attributed the inspiration for the concept of the people’s sector to his conversations with guest workers.Footnote 36 To facilitate credit acquisition, in 1975 the Turkish government founded the State Industry and Laborer Investment Bank (DESİYAB), which worked closely with Halk-İş, an organization representing Workers Collectives.Footnote 37 To evaluate and advise the Workers Collectives, the West German government contracted a private consulting firm.
The Workers Collectives proved an economic boon. By 1975, the number of collectives had doubled to fifty-six, comprising a total of nearly 54,000 shareholders abroad.Footnote 38 Within just five years, these numbers quadrupled to 208 collectives and 236,171 shareholders.Footnote 39 By 1980, Workers Collectives had invested around 1.5 million DM in Turkey, established ninety-eight new companies, and created 10,000 jobs, with an estimated additional 20,000 jobs being created indirectly.Footnote 40 In 1979 and 1980, approximately 10 percent of investments in Turkey were carried out by Turkish Workers Collectives, amounting to a total of two million DM since 1972.Footnote 41
Despite preferring the individual support model, the West German government yielded to Turkish pressure due to a genuine belief in the potential for Workers Collectives to fulfill the dual goals of improving the Turkish economy and promoting remigration. A German bureaucrat who traveled to Turkey’s Black Sea region to evaluate eight local Workers Collectives marveled at the “positive effect” on the local economy. Funding the Workers Collectives, he wrote, “currently appears to be the best form of assistance for Turkey.”Footnote 42 In a 1980 report, West German officials announced that creating 20,000 industrial jobs for returning workers would be a “realistic goal.” Although the number of jobs that actually went to returning guest workers “wavers from case to case,” the report took comfort in the observation that the bylaws of the Workers Collectives “generally give priority to members who return to Turkey in job placement.”Footnote 43
This assumption was severely misguided. After pouring a massive 60 million DM into Workers Collectives over the past decade, West Germany learned a startling truth: most guest workers who had purchased stock in the firms were not planning to return to Turkey to work at them.Footnote 44 On the contrary, an extensive 1982 program evaluation revealed that the shareholders had an “irrational” motivation: much like “planting a tree,” they desired only to “symbolically support” their home regions, “precisely because of their permanent absence.”Footnote 45 Even workers who genuinely wished to return were disappointed, as only three out of every hundred jobs went to returning guest workers.Footnote 46 Worse, only 10 percent of the Workers Collectives were successful.Footnote 47 The vast majority suffered from poor planning, inexperienced management, and insufficient capital.Footnote 48 Despite “good intentions,” even the first collective, the celebrated Türksan, had distributed dividends only once in the decade since its founding – and a meager 6 percent at that.Footnote 49
These problems were compounded by the realization that the BMZ’s definition of a Workers Collective was so lax that it permitted private Turkish businesspeople, who had not migrated to Germany, to exploit West German development aid. Given that only a majority of shareholders needed to be guest workers living in West Germany, Turkish businesspeople found a loophole: they could establish a private firm and retain a 49 percent ownership share and, as long as the remaining 51 percent was held by Turks abroad, they could receive the subsidies and benefits of being classified as a Workers Collective.Footnote 50 Firms sponsored by private Turkish businesspeople had no incentive to employ guest workers seeking to return. Some, like the textile firm Meric-Textilen-Aktiengesellschaft in Edirne, even expressed reluctance to hire its own shareholders. Instead, the firm believed that returning guest workers, who had become accustomed to the higher income and social services in West Germany, would not be willing to accept the minimum wage typically paid to local agricultural workers (in 1980, 3,300 TL or 236 DM).Footnote 51
Even amid these revelations, Turkey continued to exploit West German naiveté. Desperate to maintain the flow of Deutschmarks, Prime Minister Ecevit jumped to the Workers Collectives’ defense: “Whatever has been achieved is the accomplishment of the Turkish worker,” and “whatever mistakes have been committed are the fault of others!”Footnote 52 When West Germany tried to return to the individual support model throughout the 1980s, Turkish officials’ reactions were “not especially encouraging.”Footnote 53 The final result was bleak. By 1988, sixteen years after signing the Treaty of Ankara and envisioning a large-scale training program to promote return migration through the individual support model, the West German government had distributed only four hundred loans directly to returning guest workers and a mere five hundred had participated in a training program.Footnote 54 Although West Germany had succeeded in assisting the Turkish economy, it had failed in its primary goal of convincing guest workers to leave, and was thus wasting its money.Footnote 55 As the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung put it, this “quite excellent idea” turned out to be a “flop.”Footnote 56
Money, Manipulation, Mistrust
If the Turkish government sought to portray itself as the caretaker of its citizens abroad, then why did it vehemently oppose programs that would help them realize their dreams of returning to Turkey and starting their own businesses? One important reason was Turkish economic planners’ conviction that funneling West German development aid into Workers Collectives would be far more lucrative than helping individual guest workers with what they regarded as frivolous ventures, such as buying a couple dozen cows, opening a bakery, or starting a taxi business. Yet supporting the Workers Collectives did not necessarily preclude entertaining the possibility of West Germany’s individual support model. Pursuing both options simultaneously, moreover, would have helped far more guest workers than it did. The real reason cut much deeper: fundamentally, for financial reasons, the Turkish government did not want the guest workers to return.
Since the 1961 start of the guest worker program, the Turkish government made no secret that guest workers were crucial to its economy. Turkey’s 1963–1967 development plan touted the program for mitigating unemployment by “exporting surplus labor.”Footnote 57 But in 1973, the bubble burst. Fearing its own rise in unemployment amid the OPEC oil crisis, West Germany abruptly ceased all new guest worker recruitment. The recruitment stop proved devastating not only to hundreds of thousands of Turks, many of whom were literally standing in line at recruitment offices at the time of the announcement, but also to the Turkish government. In the months before the recruitment stop, a BMZ official involved in the development aid negotiations called it “urgently necessary” to warn the Turkish government of the harsh reality: West Germany “cannot permanently solve the Turkish unemployment problem.”Footnote 58
Unable to export additional labor to Germany, the Turkish government desperately hoped that the guest workers who were already there would stay put. During a 1974 visit to Bonn, Turkish Ambassador Vahit Halefoğlu expressed “fears of a mass remigration,” as unemployment was expected to double by 1987, compounded by an estimated population growth from 37.5 to 55 million.Footnote 59 A decade later, following a bilateral development aid meeting in 1983, BMZ officials reported that “there is a general fear here that the dam against remigration could break” – even “if one makes exceptions.”Footnote 60 Returning guest workers, the Turkish government further insisted, “expect too high a salary” and “return to such provinces where no need for their labor exists.” Such statements revealed a lack of confidence in the guest workers. Skeptical that even the best-laid and best-financed plans to start small businesses would ever materialize, Turkish officials categorically assumed that returning guest workers would reenter the labor market. Their own government viewed them as destined to fail and, in this way, helped perpetuate their failure.Footnote 61
Even more worrisome than unemployment was the prospect that a mass remigration would lead to a decline in remittance payments, which were crucial not only to guest workers’ families but also to the Turkish economy. Like exporting surplus labor, remittances had been a crucial part of Turkey’s various Five-Year Development Plans. The 1968–1972 plan affirmed the need to redirect remittances toward investments in productive sectors,Footnote 62 the 1973–1977 plan praised remittances as the “most important” factor allowing the country to repay its foreign debt,Footnote 63 and the 1979–1983 plan expressed the need for greater state control over remittances and to direct them “rationally” to the National Treasury and State Economic Enterprises.Footnote 64 The growing reliance on remittances reflected that they were among the few sources of foreign currency at a time of limited exports and foreign debt.Footnote 65 In short, explained Cumhuriyet in 1971, Turkey viewed the guest workers as “hens that lay golden eggs,” whose key duty was to “fill the vaults of the Central Bank.”Footnote 66
As early as the 1960s, the Turkish government enacted measures to facilitate the transfer of guest workers’ Deutschmarks. The Turkish Postal Service prepared bilingual remittance forms, and the government detailed the step-by-step process in advice books printed for workers living abroad.Footnote 67 To ensure that guest workers’ money yielded interest for the government, a 1973 advice book cautioned guest workers against sending cash home in envelopes – a crime that, if caught, could lead to federal prosecution.Footnote 68 While guest workers seeking to transfer money by mail could fill out a handwritten remittance form at a German post office, the advice book warned them about numerous problems, such as having insufficient language skills to handwrite the sum in German, and that transferring sums larger than 1,300 DM required two forms. The best option, the advice book counseled, was to use the special postal checks offered by Turkish banks, as the German employees representing the banks could help fill out the forms. Efforts to direct guest workers’ remittances through formal channels thus tightened the two countries’ institutional relationships.
Filling out remittance forms was a central part of guest workers’ everyday lives, and Turks sent more money home on a regular basis than other guest worker nationalities (Figure 3.2).Footnote 69 Murad, whose father opened a tailor shop in Witten after spending several years as a guest worker, marveled at the number of guest workers who visited the tailor shop daily not to have their pants hemmed or suits taken in, but rather to fill out paperwork. Although Murad did not fully understand the process as a child, his father told him that the pieces of paper featuring colorful pictures of Turkish landmarks that he stored behind the counter were remittance forms (havale deftleri). Often with assistance from Murad’s father, who could speak both Turkish and German and was thus in a relatively privileged position, the guest workers filled out the forms, indicating the number of Deutschmarks to transfer, the recipient’s name, and the bank branch in Turkey where the money would be picked up. The guest workers then took the forms to a German bank or a Turkish bank with branches in Germany, basing their decisions on the lowest transaction fees.Footnote 70
Figure 3.2 Guest workers send remittances at Türkiye Halk Bankası, one of the many Turkish banks with branches in West Germany, ca. 1970.
The Turkish government also developed schemes to incentivize guest workers to deposit their Deutschmarks in savings accounts at Turkish banks. With the introduction of convertible Turkish lira deposits (CTLDs) in 1967, guest workers could open special accounts in Turkish commercial banks at an interest rate that was 1.75 percent higher than the Euromarket rate. Sweetening the deal, the publicly owned Turkish Republican Central Bank guaranteed the principal and interest against the risk of a potential lira devaluation. The Turkish government, too, benefitted from the CTLDs, which constituted short-term loans in Deutschmarks. In terms of process, the commercial banks transferred guest workers’ deposited Deutschmarks directly to the Turkish Central Bank, which returned the adjusted sum in lira and further loaned the Deutschmarks to state-owned enterprises for the financing of imports, long-term investment projects, and the repayment of foreign debt. In 1975, luxuriating in the massive influx of foreign currency, the Turkish government extended the opportunity to hold CTLDs to all nonresidents, including foreign corporations.Footnote 71
As part of the CTLD scheme, the Turkish government also sought out a West German partnership. In a 1976 agreement between the Turkish Central Bank and West Germany’s Dresdner Bank, the Turkish government offered up to an additional 1 percent in interest for guest workers who opened convertible accounts at Dresdner Bank, which would then transfer the Deutschmarks to the Turkish Central Bank in exchange for lira.Footnote 72 The two banks, cooperating with West Berlin’s Bank for Trade and Industry, advertised their joint services to guest workers in a colorful pamphlet featuring the bold Turkish text “How to Open a Foreign Savings Account” over a backdrop of alternating lira and Deutschmark bills.Footnote 73 The back cover provided examples in both languages to assist customers in voicing their requests for transfers, withdrawals, and deposits. In another pamphlet, the Turkish Central Bank boasted about its advantageous exchange rate due to its partnerships and cautioned workers to avoid trading money on the black market. Appealing to the guest workers’ nostalgia and nationalism, the pamphlet suggested that investing would offer “endless possibilities, both for you and for your country.”Footnote 74
The Dresdner Bank partnership notwithstanding, West German and Turkish banks typically engaged in fierce competition for guest workers’ Deutschmarks. In one ethno-marketing advertisement, the West German bank Sparkasse boasted in Turkish that “Every Sparkasse is ready to help you” (Figure 3.3).Footnote 75 Yet West German banks could hardly compete: a survey of guest workers in Duisburg revealed that 83.5 percent of their deposits were in Turkish banks, and only 13.5 percent in German ones.Footnote 76 Turkish banks’ success lay partially in their savvy appeals to guest workers’ nostalgia for their homeland and separation from their loved ones. Yapı ve Kredi Bankası distributed an advertisement depicting a guest worker family in their living room with a framed photo of a faraway relative hanging on the wall, captioned: “When exchanging currency or sending remittances, the savings account you have opened at Yapı Kredi guarantees high returns for the relatives you have left behind in the homeland.”Footnote 77 Türkiye İş Bankası appealed to Turkish nationalism, insisting that its financial advisors were not only “friendly people eager to answer your questions” but also, most importantly, “your own people who speak your own language.”Footnote 78
Figure 3.3 The West German bank Sparkasse courted Turkish clients with a Turkish-language ethno-marketing advertisement stating, “Every Sparkasse is ready to help you,” ca. 1980.
Not only banks but also consumer goods corporations courted guest workers’ Deutschmarks through nationalist appeals. This trend was particularly pronounced in the cigarette market. An advertisement for the Turkish cigarette brand Topkapı, targeting guest workers, depicted a cartoon cigarette box with a speech bubble uttering Atatürk’s famous assertion, “How happy I am to be a Turk.” The accompanying text reported that Turks in West Germany spent 500 million DM annually on cigarettes and argued that, if they gave this to Topkapı instead of foreign companies, then they would “support the development of our homeland.”Footnote 79 Even non-Turkish companies pursued this strategy. A competing advertisement for the American cigarette company Camel touted the tobacco’s Turkish origin. Because Camel’s tobacco was cultivated in Izmir and was a “Turkish and American blend,” even this US-based company could be considered “part of the homeland.”Footnote 80
The push to court guest workers’ Deutschmarks did not always work. Strategically navigating the competing options, guest workers made their investment and purchasing decisions based on their and their families’ consumer preferences and financial interests rather than on nationalist rhetoric. To diversify their portfolios and take advantage of offers of high interest rates, many deposited their savings in multiple banks. One guest worker in Dortmund, Osman Gürlük, divided the minimal savings from his low monthly salary of 1,200 DM between three Turkish and West German banks – one in Istanbul and two in Dortmund – and boasted that he had saved 5,000 DM in three years, not including the remittances he sent to his wife and child in Turkey.Footnote 81 Guest workers’ financial prioritization of family over nation became especially apparent amid the rise in family migration of the 1970s. As they increasingly brought their spouses and children to West Germany and began to settle there more permanently, they had less need to send money home. Simultaneously, the economic downturn and rising unemployment after the 1973 OPEC oil crisis left many guest workers strapped for cash and unable to deposit as much into Turkish banks.
These factors, alongside West Germany’s decision to stop recruiting guest workers in 1973, led to a stark decline in remittances during the 1970s. The percentage of guest workers who regularly sent money to Turkey declined from two-thirds in 1971 to just 43 percent in 1980.Footnote 82 Between 1965 and 1974, the total amount of money guest workers sent to Turkey had quadrupled to 4.6 billion USD.Footnote 83 But abruptly, the annual remittance sum plummeted by nearly one-third, from 1.4 billion USD in 1974 to just 980 million USD in 1976, and hovered there through 1978. Remittances temporarily recovered in the first half of 1979 due to the 44 percent devaluation of the lira and a brief return to confidence in investment, but they declined again later that year due to continued political and economic instability. Not until the 1980s, when the economy began to recover following the postcoup neoliberal economic overhaul, did remittances return to a steady rate.
The nosedive in remittances had serious consequences (Figure 3.4). Not only did the decline cost Turkey 1.7 percent of its Gross National Product (GNP) for 1974–1976, but it also exacerbated the country’s foreign debt crisis amid the international oil shocks of the 1970s. Between 1973 and 1977, the same period as the decline in remittances, Turkey’s foreign debt jumped from 3 billion USD to 11 billion USD, accounting for a rise from 8 percent to 23 percent of the country’s GNP.Footnote 84 The political instability and repeated changing of governments throughout the 1970s – coupled with policymakers’ refusal to reform their failing economic policies – made Turkey highly susceptible to global recessions and price fluctuations, and the Turkish Central Bank’s excessive short-term borrowing through guest workers’ CTLDs contributed markedly to the accumulation of debt. Of all the debtor countries, Turkey’s situation was particularly dire: Turkey alone held 69 percent of the total debt among the developing countries that worked with the IMF and the World Bank to reschedule their foreign payment obligations and to implement structural adjustment and austerity programs between 1978 and 1980.Footnote 86 Although Turkey’s foreign debt as percentage of GNP continued to rise throughout the 1980s, the growth reflects the five Structural Adjustment Loans granted by the World Bank and the IMF from 1980 to 1984, which had an overall stabilizing effect on the Turkish economy.Footnote 87
Figure 3.4 Significance of guest workers’ remittances to the Turkish economy. Examining the 1976–1978 period in particular reveals that the stark decline in remittances exacerbated Turkey’s economic crisis by coinciding with a detrimental rise in external debt, inflation, and unemployment. Graph created by author.Footnote 85
But for ordinary individuals living in the throes of the 1977–1979 debt crisis, the economic recovery of the 1980s was difficult to imagine, and any optimism was overshadowed by the turmoil they confronted in their everyday lives. By 1980, inflation had skyrocketed to over 90 percent, leading to a 250 percent increase in the price of oil.Footnote 88 Policymakers hurriedly implemented austerity measures in January through a 30 percent devaluation of the lira and a prioritization of exports over internal consumption. Still, the winter months proved especially harsh. Individuals and families who were unable to afford oil and coal endured freezing, unheated homes.Footnote 89 They likewise struggled to afford everyday commodities like sugar, coffee, cigarettes, and alcohol.Footnote 90 This misery exacerbated the ongoing political unrest that motivated the 1980 military coup.
Aware that guest workers’ declining remittances were aggravating the debt crisis, observers who had not migrated, particularly in the Turkish media and government, began openly criticizing guest workers’ spending habits. Among the most vocal was Milliyet columnist Örsan Öymen, who had lived in West Germany while working as an editor at Westdeutscher Rundfunk. In a provocative column, Öymen blamed Turkey’s woes on the guest workers’ selfish refusal to send remittances. Remittances, he argued, were guest workers’ civic duty – their means of giving back to their homeland in exchange for their special privileges, such as the ability to import certain goods duty-free. To boost remittances, and to help Turkey escape the “yoke of foreign financial capital institutions,” Öymen proposed a law that would force guest workers to remit a mandatory sum set by the Turkish government. By his calculation, if each guest worker transferred 20 DM daily in remittances to their families or bank accounts in Turkey, that would amount to 7.2 billion DM or 4 billion USD annually. “Is it not the state’s right to demand a sacrifice from these workers, such as sending remittances to their country?” he inquired. “Why would that be unfair?”Footnote 91
Incensed by Öymen’s column, guest workers flooded his mailbox with a storm of angry letters and derided him as an “intellectual” who was out of touch with their problems.Footnote 92 At fault were not the guest workers themselves, one insisted, but rather the corrupt and profiteering Turkish banks, which “think of nothing other than snatching the marks from the workers’ hands.” The most outrage, however, was directed at the Turkish government, which had spent the remittances “irresponsibly” through failed import–export policies and had not offered an exchange rate that was competitive with the black market, where it was possible to get a 50 percent return on the sale of Deutschmarks. Without referencing the bilateral development aid negotiations directly, another man questioned why the Turkish government had refused to provide loans to individual guest workers who wanted to invest in Turkey or had encountered financial problems. The government’s seeming apathy or hostility toward its citizens’ needs was all the worse, one man wrote, because “we are masses of patriotic workers,” who have “contributed to the country’s development” by “pouring out sweat” and “scavenging European countries’ waste and trash off the streets.”
Amid this outcry, the Turkish government made no secret of its economically based opposition to return migration. In April 1982, Der Tagesspiegel reported that after four days of intensive talks with Turkish Foreign Minister İlter Türkmen and Prime Minister Bülent Ulusu, West Berlin Mayor Richard von Weizsäcker “now understands better than before that Turkey, amid its economic situation and high native unemployment, cannot be interested in a large wave of remigration.”Footnote 93 Several months later, the Turkish tabloid Güneş ran a front-page article reporting the guest workers’ concerns that their countrymen would be hostile to their return. The migrants had learned of the Turkish population’s fears that they would overburden the labor market and “evaporate any hopes that those currently unemployed would ever find a job.”Footnote 94 A Der Spiegel article exposed the central tension clearly: while the Turkish government “appears” to harbor a “humane concern for the fate of their countrymen,” they are primarily concerned with “tangible economic interests” and a mass remigration would “plague” the country.Footnote 95
The association between the guest workers’ remittances and the Turkish government’s disinterest in their return was clearest during a tense January 1983 meeting in the northwestern Turkish city of Bolu, where representatives of several local Turkish Workers Collectives, Turkey’s DESİYAB Bank, and West German and Turkish government officials met to discuss how guest workers’ savings could be used to finance the development of the Turkish economy.Footnote 96 The Turkish newspaper Hürriyet reported that these tensions came to a head in a contentious “duel of words” between West German State Secretary Siegfried Lengl of the BMZ and Turkish Finance Minister Adnan Başer Kafaoğlu. When Lengl began to plea for Turkish understanding of West Germany’s labor market concerns and the urgent need for workers to return to their home country, Kafaoğlu abandoned his prepared speech and firmly underscored the significance of guest worker remittance payments to the Turkish national economy. “Turkey needs the workers’ remittances for many years to come,” the newspaper paraphrased, “and she will not pull back her workers.”Footnote 97
The realization that the Turkish government prioritized guest workers’ Deutschmarks over their own well-being soured the migrants’ impression of their homeland. Saim Çetinbaş, a former guest worker who had opened a Turkish grocery store in West Berlin, explained how he had repeatedly sought to heed the call for investment but had received no official assistance and only trouble from the Turkish government. The most devastating of his many failed business ventures involved a pickle factory that he opened from West Germany on a 22,000 square-meter plot of land in Çerkezköy. After he closed the factory at a loss of 2 million DM, the municipal government apparently seized the rest of the land with no notice and no recompense. Rather than “thanking” him for investing his Deutschmarks, the government “always makes things more difficult,” he complained. His scorn, however, extended to the Turkish population as a whole: “In the eyes of Turkey, we are all viewed as marks. No one thinks about us as having flesh and blood.” Outraged, Çetinbaş swore never to permanently return to Turkey. For him, it was only a “beautiful vacation country,” where his children happily sunbathed along the Mediterranean Sea each summer. As for any deeper connection to Turkey, “I don’t think about those who don’t think about me.”Footnote 98
This mistrust and sense of betrayal went much further, however, and became a core component of the way that guest workers viewed their changing relationship to Turkey. A 1983 study conducted by the University of Ankara and the University of Duisburg–Essen revealed that a startling 90 percent of Turkish guest workers in West Germany believed that the Turkish government viewed them only as sources of remittances.Footnote 99 İsmail Akar, who had worked in Germany from 1963 to 1980, encapsulated this sentiment in a scathing interview with Milliyet: “If you ask me, the first priority of past politicians was to abandon our workers in Germany like a burdensome, barren herd. They view us as remittance machines.”Footnote 100 By viewing the guest workers so starkly in economic terms – not just as laborers, but as machines churning out Deutschmarks – Turkey stripped guest workers of their humanity and relegated their wishes to the backburner. Although West Germany also viewed guest workers in economic terms, the pain stung worse when it came from a faraway homeland to which many guest workers yearned to return.
Serve in the Military – Or Pay
The Turkish government also exploited the Deutschmarks of guest workers’ children by providing the option for military-age youths living in West Germany to serve only two rather than twenty months of mandatory military service. This “military service by payment” (bedelli askerlik), as it was called, came with a catch: a price of 20,000 DM. This hefty sum, over six months of wages for the average Turkish migrant, was an impossibility for the up to 400,000 young men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-two affected by the policy. Facing the prospect of losing their jobs after long absences, they resorted to desperate measures to come up with the money. By the mid-1980s, the notion that the Turkish government was maliciously exploiting its young countrymen’s Deutschmarks prompted a wave of grassroots activism, attracting the support of sympathetic West German observers eager to criticize the Turkish government.
Mandatory military service in Turkey had a long history. The 1927 Military Law, passed just four years after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the Turkish Republic, applied not only to able-bodied men born in Turkey but also, explicitly, to “immigrants” and “foreigners” who had Turkish citizenship, even if they lived abroad. Because those between twenty and forty-one years of age were subject to an eighteen-month basic training and draft lottery, the law posed a particular conundrum for guest workers, many of whom had migrated to Germany at precisely that age and who, due to unscrupulous employers eager to fire Turks, encountered difficulties returning to Turkey without losing their jobs. The law also affected guest workers’ children born in Turkey but brought to Germany, who reached adulthood abroad. To remedy the situation, the Turkish government amended the law in 1976. Whereas citizens living in Turkey could postpone their military service for only two years, those living abroad could petition the consulate for postponement every two years until age thirty-eight.Footnote 101
In 1979, at the height of Turkey’s foreign currency crisis, the Turkish government revised the Military Law to permit citizens abroad to pay their way into a shortened two-month military service. As so often with Turkish policies toward the migrants abroad, the goal was primarily financial. Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit’s major announcement of the draft amendment came in a speech on plans to strengthen the economy and to “make use of” guest workers’ remittances, while Defense Minister Neşet Akmandor publicly explained that the policy would be the “most efficient and effective use of a large and important resource.”Footnote 102 Reflecting the policy’s orientation particularly toward Turks in West Germany, the revised Military Law explicitly cast the sum not in lira but in “Deutschmarks or the equivalent in other currencies.” While Ecevit set the price at 5,000 DM, the amendment, as passed the next year under the new prime minister, Süleyman Demirel, reduced the period of service to one month and doubled the price to 10,000 DM.
The price abruptly doubled again to 20,000 DM following Turkey’s 1980 military coup, when the authoritarian government ushered in an era of increased societal militarization and attacked the economic crisis by decree. By January 1982, Turkey had pocketed an impressive 2.4 billion lira in military exemption fees, the vast majority of which went to the Defense Ministry budget.Footnote 103 A few years later, this number climbed to 500 million DM – a “welcome injection of cash,” marveled one West German newspaper, considering that Turkey had over 30 billion USD in foreign debt.Footnote 104
Always eager to report on guest workers’ relationships to their home countries, and to portray the Turkish government negatively, the West German media expressed a curious fascination with the topic of “guest workers in uniform.” Repeatedly, journalists emphasized that the exorbitant 20,000 DM price tag reflected not only the postcoup authoritarianism and militarization of Turkish society but also the government’s desire to exploit the workers’ Deutschmarks. Compared to other guest worker nationalities, this assessment rang true. By the 1980s, military-age Greek citizens living abroad could pay between 500 and 1,000 DM for an exemption, Portuguese men could pay a meager 90 DM, and Italians and Spaniards enjoyed exemptions free of charge. Only Yugoslavs faced harsher restrictions than Turks, as the outright lack of exemptions meant that they had to return to Yugoslavia for a fifteen-month period of service.Footnote 105
Still, even paying the 20,000 DM did not free guest workers from conflicts with their employers, which became matters of dispute in West German courts. Amid unemployment and rising anti-Turkish racism, even a two-month absence for a shortened military service could cost a Turkish worker his job, or at least several months of wages. While West Germany’s 1957 Law for Job Protection in Case of Conscription guaranteed that workers would not be terminated from their jobs during their military service, the law did not apply to guest workers.Footnote 106 In 1981, a thirty-two-year-old Turkish guest worker successfully sued the Krupp steel factory for refusing to grant him unpaid vacation for his military service (thereby firing him) and won 4,000 DM in wages.Footnote 107 Others lost their cases. Several months later, a Regional Labor Court in Hamm ruled against a guest worker in a similar situation, determining that the employer had not violated his “duty of care.”Footnote 108
The judicial ambivalence was finally settled in September 1983, when the Federal Labor Court in Kassel ruled that “German employers must grant leave to and later reemploy Turkish citizens for the length of the shortened mandatory military service in Turkey.”Footnote 109 This victory, however, was limited. Privileging wealthier guest workers, the protection applied only to those who had enough money to finance the 20,000 DM for a shortened military service, meaning that employers could still legally fire guest workers whose inability to pay the sum required them to complete the full eighteen months. As Mete Atsu, a Turkish board member of the German Confederation of Trade Unions, complained, “What employer is voluntarily willing to keep a job open for a Turk for eighteen months?”Footnote 110 This discrepancy was especially troubling to guest workers’ children, who, upon reaching adulthood and entering the job market, were not only lower-paid but also dispensable. “Normally, twenty- to thirty-year-olds would be establishing their livelihoods,” noted a Turkish social worker. “Now they have to give the money to the state.”Footnote 111
Horror stories of the harsh conditions in the postcoup Turkish military, widely reported in the West German media, intensified the need to scramble together the 20,000 DM. An exposé in Vorwärts, the Social Democratic Party’s official newspaper, publicized the miserable experience of Ramazan Türkoğlu, a telecommunications worker in Cologne who had returned from his two-month basic training in Burdur: he and the other eighty recruits were forced to sleep in a small and poorly ventilated room, he had observed a corporal brutally beating a recruit, and rumor had it that the food was laced with medications to suppress their libidos.Footnote 112 For regime opponents, the sheer prospect of returning to Turkey posed a threat. Hamza Sinanoğlu, who had lobbied on behalf of Kurdish asylum seekers in West Germany, was detained for a week immediately upon arriving in Turkey for his military service. Sahabedin Buz was tortured for five months after the military courts accused him of reading the IG Metall trade union newspaper and collaborating with communists.Footnote 113
With these dual anxieties of losing their jobs and subjecting themselves to the harsh conditions in Turkey, many military-age youths scrambled to pay their way out of military service by any means necessary – even if they could not afford the 20,000 DM. For those who had become self-sufficient, one option was to sell their businesses. One man living in Bockenheim placed a personal advertisement in the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet, announcing his intent to sell his specialty Balkan grocery store in West Germany to make “the money necessary for my military service,” while another sought to sell his tailor shop “urgently” for the same reason.Footnote 114 Given that most military-age youths were wage laborers, however, a more common option was to turn to their parents for financial assistance. But even if their parents had worked in Germany for two decades, they could often not afford the 20,000 DM price tag and, even if they could, they planned to use it toward their dream of returning to Turkey. The burden on parents’ wallets was especially difficult for families with multiple children. A family with four sons, for example, would be required to come up with 80,000 DM – an impossibility for the vast majority of parents. Parents were thus forced to choose which of their children they would assist, if any.
Absent financial assistance from their parents, many young men attempted to finance the 20,000 DM by taking out loans. Going through formal channels, however, proved difficult. Wary of taking risks on Turkish youths they deemed likely to lose their jobs and thus default on their loans, West German banks generally granted a maximum of 6,000 DM.Footnote 115 The banks also required loan-seeking Turkish customers to provide financial guarantees (Bürgschaften) from two other individuals, one of whom had to be German.Footnote 116 To circumvent these hindrances, many men resorted to taking loans from wealthy private individuals, “dubious money-lenders,” and “loan sharks,” all of whom charged exorbitant interest rates.Footnote 117 West German journalists emphasized that the pressure to repay the loans forced the young men into money-making criminal activities such as the illicit drug trade – an assessment reflecting longstanding tropes about Turkish men’s criminality.Footnote 118 In one sensationalist article, Hürriyet reported the case of a twenty-eight-year-old migrant in Bielefeld who was allegedly murdered by a family member for demanding that his father-in-law repay a 20,000 DM loan so that he could use it to pay his way out of military service.Footnote 119
Those who simply ignored their military conscription faced harsh long-term consequences. Under Turkey’s 1930 Law on Absentee Conscripts and Draft Evaders, even a one-day delay in arrival to military service during peacetime could result in imprisonment of up to one month.Footnote 120 And given that Turkey, unlike West Germany, did not recognize conscientious objection, saving face by claiming to oppose military service on moral or religious grounds was not an option. One young man who decided not to report to basic training told the Rheinische Post that he had come to deeply regret the decision. The Turkish consulate had refused to renew his passport and was threatening to revoke his Turkish citizenship altogether. As a “stateless person” without a passport, he would face deportation to Turkey, where he would surely be imprisoned for draft evasion.Footnote 121
Feeling exploited not only by the loan sharks but also by the Turkish government, young Turkish men living in West Germany spoke out against the 20,000 DM and banded together in activism. In March 1984, discussions in schools, coffee houses, and workplaces consolidated into a formal protest movement with the establishment of the Federal Initiative of Military-Age Youth from Turkey (FEBAG). The grassroots organization, run by military-age youths themselves, initiated a letter-writing campaign to the Turkish government demanding a reduction of the price to a more manageable 5,000 DM.Footnote 122 With initial branches in the Ruhr cities of Bochum, Gelsenkirchen, and Herne, FEBAG quickly spread to nearly one hundred West German cities, where its members staged well-attended demonstrations featuring Turkish food and recreational activities like soccer tournaments and breakdancing. The organization also distributed a Turkish-language newsletter called Bedel, which alongside well-argued articles about the cause also contained effective cartoons, such as a drawing of a man being crushed by the weight of a 20,000 DM money bag. In another particularly striking cartoon, a man dressed in women’s clothing begs a German doctor for help: “By God, Herr Doctor, I don’t have 20,000 marks, but I do have 200 bucks for you if you’ll do an operation to make me a woman and save me from military service” (Figure 3.5). This strategy paid off: the FEBAG activists collected the signatures of 20,000 young men and their fathers, who in many cases would be the ones shelling out the money.
Figure 3.5 FEBAG activists published a humorous cartoon in their newsletter, conveying the desperation that young migrants felt when trying to pay their way out of military service, 1984. The caption reads: “By God, Herr Doctor, I don’t have 20,000 marks, but I do have 200 bucks for you if you’ll do an operation to make me a woman and save me from military service.”
While the struggle surrounding military service affected Turkish men living in West Germany, FEBAG connected its activism fundamentally to the question of return migration. Not only did the activists argue that paying the 20,000 DM would be a waste of money that they might have otherwise spent toward the costs of remigrating to Turkey, but they also condemned the government’s overall failure to create jobs and training opportunities for individuals who wished to return. “What has been done with the 500 million marks we have sent?” the activists questioned, chastising the Turkish government for using their remittances for the defense budget rather than the “development of the homeland.”Footnote 123 Although Defense Minister Zeki Yavuztürk attempted to stifle these concerns by insisting that military-age youths who paid the 20,000 DM were “performing a national service,” the activists saw through the rhetoric and continued to emphasize the Turkish government’s failure to address the difficulties faced by return migrants.Footnote 124 As one young man who had grown up in West Germany and now faced unemployment explained, “I need the money to return to Turkey” but “I have no chance of finding a job in Turkey either.”Footnote 125
Soon, FEBAG’s platform not only spread to Turkish migrants in the Netherlands but also attracted the support of important stakeholders throughout West Germany and Turkey. FEBAG’s allies tended to be left or center-left organizations that generally supported Turkish migrants: the German Confederation of Trade Unions (DGB), the metalworkers’ trade union IG Metall, and the Protestant churches. Individuals with similar political inclinations also supported FEBAG, including select Social Democratic and Green Party parliamentarians and Liselotte Funcke, the Federal Commissioner for the Integration of Foreigners. FEBAG’s cause also resonated with Turkey’s Confederation of Turkish Trade Unions (Türk-İş), as well as organizations founded by Turkish migrants in West Germany, such as the Federation of Workers Associations (FİDEF), the Federation of Progressive People’s Associations in Europe (HDF), and the Turkish Youth Association in West Berlin.
For these allies, FEBAG’s platform fit into a broader political message: condemning Turkey for abuses that continued after the military coup, despite the country’s professed transition to democracy with the 1983 elections. Expressing their support for FEBAG, West German DGB representatives disparaged the “immoral” 20,000 DM sum as a “shameless exploitation of your emergency situation in the service of financing a military dictatorship, which is painstakingly trying to hide behind a guise of democracy.”Footnote 126 The West Berlin Turkish Youth Association, which like many left-wing organizations criticized Cold War militarism, connected FEBAG’s platform to a broader critique of Turkey’s geopolitical ties to NATO and the United States. Given that the military exemption fees were going to the defense budget, the association insisted that supporting FEBAG would help “liberate Turkey from the yoke of the NATO aggressor,” “ensure the security of Turkey against imperialism,” and “protect the democratic rights of working people.”Footnote 127
West German newspapers, which were likewise eager to criticize the abuses of Turkey’s military government, expressed sympathy for FEBAG. The Westfälische Rundschau argued that the 20,000 DM sum was “immoral,” described it as “plundering,” and suggested that the Turkish government was using “robber baron methods” to steal the migrants’ money.Footnote 128 As Hanover’s Neue Presse put it, “Ankara apparently values the foreign currency more than the young soldiers.”Footnote 129 Another publication drew a parallel to the Ottoman Empire – frequently used as a negative foil to highlight the glory of West German democracy against Turkish authoritarianism – during which young men sold into slavery and military service were forced to “passively acquiesce to their fates.”Footnote 130 Forceful quotations from FEBAG’s supporters hammered the message home. “We work and work and save a bit, and then we send the money to our government,” one supporter complained.Footnote 131 “The government does not want us at all. They just want the money,” another complained. In the most memorable quote, which allegedly “shocked” reporters, one man hyperbolized: “The easiest thing you can do is cut off your index finger because when you’re missing a body part, you don’t have to go to military service.”Footnote 132
Bolstered by West German media coverage, FEBAG successfully reshaped Turkish policy. In May 1984, just two months after FEBAG’s founding, Turkish Defense Minister Yavuztürk announced the existence of a proposal to reduce the price but cautioned the activists not to get their hopes up.Footnote 133 Although Yavuztürk did not mention FEBAG directly, his justification for the proposed reduction echoed the organization’s main talking points. “Our citizens abroad consider this price too high and report that it is a heavy burden,” he noted, adding that individuals who took out predatory loans often had to pay an additional 10,000 DM in interest, for a total of 30,000 DM.Footnote 134 The proposal was successful: a month after Yavuztürk’s announcement, the government submitted a bill to parliament decreasing the price from 20,000 to 15,000 DM, reducing the length of service from twenty to eighteen months, and raising the age deadline from thirty to thirty-two.Footnote 135
Still not satisfied, FEBAG continued to demand a reduction of the sum to 5,000 DM and increased their efforts to lobby politicians. In November 1984, the SPD fraction of the Hamburg city council petitioned the state senate to mitigate the problem by guaranteeing that the young men be allowed to return to Germany without losing their jobs even after serving the full eighteen-month military service, and the state senate enacted the law the following spring.Footnote 136 West German politicians’ willingness to accommodate young Turkish migrants made the Turkish government’s continued refusal to lower the price to 5,000 DM all the more frustrating. By 1986, FEBAG had developed more creative ways of lobbying, including protesting in front of eight Turkish consulate offices throughout West Germany while wearing nothing but their pajamas. As the organization elaborated in a flyer, “Up until now, we have worn suits and ties, and nevertheless we were ignored by the Turkish authorities. Now we are going to show up in pajamas and nightgowns.”Footnote 137
Despite such stunts, FEBAG’s 5,000 DM goal never materialized. Even though Turkey reduced the price to 10,000 DM in 1988, the activists continued to portray themselves as “victims.” In an elegant poem speaking to Turkish migrants’ larger sense of betrayal, one activist echoed the oft-touted notion that the Turkish government viewed them as little more than “remittance machines”: “Have you ever worked abroad? Do you know what it means to be a migrant? Do you understand the younger generation? You have your palms open, expecting something from our wallets. All the laws you have passed are for yourselves. You want to take advantage of the destitute migrants … We are not remittance machines. We are Turkish youths living abroad.”Footnote 138
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Whether redirecting West German development aid, urging guest workers to send remittance payments, or squeezing money out of young military-age men, the Turkish government’s opposition to return migration throughout the 1970s and 1980s reflected a consistent trend: prioritizing national economic goals over guest workers’ and their children’s needs. Whereas the Turkish government in the early 1960s valued the guest workers for their ability to return and contribute to their homeland using their knowledge and skills cultivated in West Germany, by the 1970s and 1980s the government derived the migrants’ value as citizens precisely from their absence from their home country. Turks living in West Germany remained official citizens of Turkey, but their value to the nation was no longer tied to their physical presence within the borders of the Turkish nation-state. Instead, it was based on their ability to contribute to the country’s economy by remaining abroad, by not inundating the overburdened Turkish labor market with their unwanted bodies, and by investing Deutschmarks in their homeland.
This new set of relations reflected Turkey’s efforts to position itself within the broader world and to make sense of its own identity. In practical terms, the obsession with guest workers’ Deutschmarks was fundamentally the product of Turkey’s macroeconomic struggles as it adjusted to its outward orientation in the age of global neoliberal capitalism and attempted to alleviate the debt crisis of the late 1970s. But it also reflected a deeper crisis of Turkey’s national identity as those at home grappled with redefining their relationship to the Almancı 3,000 kilometers away.
To conceal their obsession with coopting guest workers’ Deutschmarks, both the government and corporations – from banks to cigarette companies – used nationalist rhetoric that sought to embrace the ostracized migrants as core parts of the nation, or the vatan. But guest workers saw through this rhetoric. Many sincerely wished to return to their home country and could have greatly benefitted from Turkey’s cooperation with West Germany’s bilateral development programs promoting return migration. Instead, they felt as though they were being abandoned and exploited by the government of their homeland. The novelist Bekir Yıldız’s satirical interpretation – that guest workers should even “give up eating” for the sake of their home country’s struggling economy – rang true. Manipulation had created mistrust.
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