Part II - Kicking out the Turks

4 Racism in Hitler’s Shadow

From the 1960s through the 1980s, Turkish migrants had to contend not only with their growing estrangement from their home country but also with rising racism in Germany. Former guest workers themselves marked the early 1980s as a turning point in their mistreatment in Germany, which represented a stark transition from the “welcome” they recalled having received when they first arrived. “Back then, Turks did not have a bad image,” one former guest worker noted. “To the contrary, every other German said, ‘You were our allies in the First World War.’”¹ Several other Turkish men, who had been some of the first guest workers to arrive in Duisburg, concurred. The early 1960s “were beautiful and happy times for us all.” “It was an honor,” they recalled, for German firms to employ Turks. But, by 1982, everything had changed. “Now we are like squeezed-out lemons that they want to throw away.”²

This interpretation, in some respects, represents a distortion of the past through rose-colored glasses. While the situation had certainly worsened since the 1960s, this interpretation belied the reality that, as this book has shown, Turkish guest workers and their children faced discrimination as soon as they arrived. At the factories and mines where they toiled, they had been crammed into poorly outfitted dormitories, segregated along ethnic lines, and frequently discriminated against by their German coworkers and higher-ups. Amid economic downturns, they had been the first to get fired from their jobs – with managers sometimes, as in the 1973 “wildcat strike” at the Ford factory, justifying their dismissal based on their tardy return from their summer vacations to Turkey. German media outlets had spread sensationalist stories of guest workers’ criminality and sexual abuse, branding Turkish men as hot-headed and impulsive and associating them with their dangerously tempting “Mediterranean,” “Oriental,” and “Asiatic” origins. Internalizing these narratives, German women had often refused – or were afraid – to date Turks. And, all the while, the West German government had been trying to invent strategies for convincing Turks to leave. Many of these experiences of racism remained key features in migrants’ everyday lives over two decades, even as they brought their children and settled into Germany more permanently.

But, as former guest workers rightly observed, the early 1980s were a peculiar beast when it came to racism. A March 1982 poll revealed that 55 percent of Germans believed that guest workers should return to their home country, compared to just 39 percent in 1978.³ As the call “Turks out!” (Türken raus!) grew louder, policymakers took harsher action. Whereas they had previously promoted return migration through development aid to Turkey, they increasingly debated whether to unilaterally pass a law that would, in critics’ view, “kick out” the Turks. Importantly, as Maria Alexopoulou has emphasized, West German racism was not only a matter of individual or collective attitudes toward migrants, or of the everyday racism that migrants faced in encounters with Germans, but it was also structural and institutional, pervading all aspects of migrants’ lives (Figure 4.1). It manifested in local, state, and federal legislation, in unequal professional, educational, and housing opportunities, and in migrants’ higher propensity for unemployment and poverty.⁴

Figure 4.1 Emblematic of rising racism, West Germans sometimes banned Turkish clientele from their establishments. This sign in Berlin-Spandau, for example, states: “Turks are not permitted in this restaurant,” 1982.

© picture alliance/dpa, used with permission.

If racism was not a new phenomenon of the 1980s, then neither was the growing emphasis on return migration. The idea of return migration, after all, was embedded in the very logic of the 1961 Turkish-German guest worker program in the ultimately unheeded “rotation principle,” whereby individual guest workers were supposed to return to Turkey after two years and be replaced by new workers. And, of course, discussions of return migration were ubiquitous throughout the 1970s, as the West German government tried – and overwhelmingly failed – to work bilaterally with intransigent Turkish officials on development aid programs in exchange for promoting the workers’ return. But, in the early 1980s, more so than ever before, the dual swords of racism and return migration clashed with and amplified each other with an unparalleled vigor and virulence. The controversial 1983 remigration law, ultimately passed under the conservative government of Helmut Kohl, was, in reality, the culmination of what the social–liberal coalition already wanted.

Given how crucial the 1980s are to this transnational story, the book now turns toward this decade and takes it as a point of focus. Part I, “Separation Anxieties,” told the “Turkish” side of the story: how the migrants became gradually estranged from their home country and perceived as “Germanized” over three decades. Part II, “Kicking out the Turks,” zooms in on just one decade – the 1980s – exposing the nexus between racism and return migration. To set the stage for Part II, the following chapter provides an in-depth exploration of what can be called the “racial reckoning” of the early 1980s, during which West Germans, Turkish migrants, and observers in Turkey all grappled – sometimes self-consciously, sometimes not – with the very nature of racism itself. From editorial boards to parliamentary chambers, from conversations with friends to scathing letters to elected officials, West Germans everywhere engaged with long-suppressed questions that struck at the core of the country’s postwar identity. Had racism disappeared with the Nazis, or did it still exist in West Germany’s prized liberal democratic society? Was racism relegated to neo-Nazis and right-wing extremists, or did it pervade the German population as a whole? Who had a claim to calling someone racist? How could one defend oneself against allegations of racism, and how could Turkish migrants – as the targets of racism – and their home country fight back?

The sheer extent of this racial reckoning in both public and private reveals an important point: even though West Germans overwhelmingly silenced the language of “race” (Rasse) and “racism” (Rassismus) after Hitler, there was in fact an explosion of public discourse about those very words at the very same time that debates about promoting Turks’ return migration surged. This chapter identifies the racial reckoning of the early 1980s as the moment when the linguistic distinction between Rassismus and Ausländerfeindlichkeit crystallized, as Germans heatedly debated whether racism still existed and what they should call it. Ausländerfeindlichkeit ultimately became a more palatable term than Rassismus because it avoided the unsavory connection to Nazi eugenics and biological racism; instead, Ausländerfeindlichkeit connoted discrimination based on socioeconomic problems and “cultural differences” (kulturelle Unterschiede), cast primarily in terms of Turks’ Muslim faith and allegedly “backward” rural origins.⁵ But, as Maria Alexopoulou has rightly argued, Ausländerfeindlichkeit was “just a variation of racism, a phase in which racist thinking won legitimacy again.”⁶ This chapter builds on these interpretations by showing that, despite Germans’ attempts to deny, deflect, and silence their racism, the “older” form of biological racism still reared its ugly head. Not only neo-Nazis but also self-proclaimed “ordinary” Germans condemned Turks as a racial “other” rather than just a cultural enemy who, through their higher birthrates and “race-mixing,” threatened to biologically “exterminate” and commit “genocide” against the German Volk.

The rise in Holocaust memory culture (Erinnerungskultur) in the 1980s is a crucial backdrop for understanding this racial reckoning. Though long suppressed and silenced, West Germans’ efforts to combat the past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung) became a matter of public discussion even more so than amid the “New Left” student protests of the late 1960s.⁷ A crucial spark was the widespread broadcasting of the 1979 American television miniseries Holocaust, which one-third of West Germany’s population – 20 million people – had watched by the following year.⁸ Attention to the crimes of Nazism grew in the mid-1980s amid the “historians’ dispute” (Historikerstreit), which saw leading intellectuals publicly debate the singularity of the Holocaust and the proper role of the memory of the Third Reich in Germany’s present. Simultaneously, the late 1970s and early 1980s witnessed an unprecedented rise in organized neo-Nazism and right-wing extremism, primarily perpetrated by a younger generation of Germans who had not grown up during the Third Reich. The neo-Nazi bombing of Munich’s Oktoberfest in 1980 was the deadliest attack in West German history, stoking fears among policymakers and the public alike that a “Hitler cult” or “Hitler renaissance” was on the rise.⁹

As the memory of the past cast a shadow over the present, antisemitism became intertwined with Islamophobia, and the Nazis’ abuse of Jews became a reference point for West Germans’ abuse of Turks. When viewed from the perspective of both Turkish migrants and their home country, West Germany’s project of commemorating the Holocaust in the 1980s was imperfect, incomplete, and – in many respects – counterproductive to the needs of other minority groups besides Jews.¹⁰ On the one hand, the rise in Holocaust memory led many Germans to recognize and to warn against the mistreatment of Turks as an unseemly historical continuity – even if they rarely invoked the words Rasse and Rassismus. On the other hand, the emphasis on the singularity of the Holocaust inadvertently made it possible for Germans to sweep the contemporary mistreatment of Turks under the rug. Most egregiously, Holocaust memory provoked a racist backlash among many right-wing Germans, who envisioned the “Turkish problem” as a new sort of “Jewish problem” and whose critique of the growing emphasis on Germans’ collective guilt for the past compounded their denial of Ausländerfeindlichkeit in the present. Holocaust memory, in this sense, was often compatible with racism against Turks.

Focusing only on racist public discourses, however, ignores the very human element of racism – the daily grind of feeling that one does not belong, the constant microaggressions from both strangers and acquaintances, and the fear of physical violence. But despite a tendency to emphasize migrants’ victimhood, neither they nor their home country stayed passive. As historian Manuela Bojadžijev has emphasized, migrants actively resisted racism since the very beginning of the guest worker program: while they rarely rallied explicitly against “racism” throughout the 1960s and 1970s, they organized local protests against a wide range of issues rooted in racism such as exorbitant rent prices, poor living conditions, discrimination in schools, reductions in child allowance payments, and tightened immigration restrictions.¹¹ Amid the racial reckoning of the 1980s, Turkish migrants’ rhetoric of resistance evolved even further. They began invoking the language of their oppressor – the hotly debated word Ausländerfeindlichkeit – as a weapon in their anti-racist arsenal. Explicitly casting their discrimination as Ausländerfeindlichkeit allowed them to issue a broader critique that united their multifaceted experiences of structural and everyday racism under a single term that was already prominent in the public sphere. Rising Holocaust memory, too, became a tool for psychologically processing their own mistreatment, helping many – especially children – realize that it was not they, as individuals, who were the problem but rather German society itself.

Criticism of West German racism also resonated transnationally in Turkey – particularly when it came to the drafting of the 1983 remigration law. Paradoxically committed to both preventing return migration and portraying itself as the migrants’ protector, the Turkish government assailed West Germans for violating the migrants’ human rights and trying to kick them out. And in the same breath as they complained about the migrants turning into Almancı, the Turkish media and population regularly compared the treatment of Turks to the Nazis’ persecution of Jews. These accusations were particularly contentious because they emerged immediately after Turkey’s 1980 military coup – the same moment that Western Europeans were assailing Turkey for its own human rights violations. The transnational battle over human rights, democracy, and Holocaust memory not only strained an otherwise friendly century of international relations between the two countries but also revealed hypocrisies, denial, and deflection on both sides.

“I’m Not a Racist, but…”

In 1981, a survey commissioned by the West German Chancellor’s Office revealed a startling conclusion: 13 percent of the German electorate harbored the “potential for right-wing extremist ideology,” 6 percent were “inclined to violence,” and another 37 percent had a “non-extreme authoritarian potential.” An astonishingly large 50 percent veered toward “cultural pessimism,” “anti-pluralism,” and “racism” and felt threatened by “over-foreignization” (Überfremdung). And, perhaps most disturbingly, 18 percent still believed that “Germany had it better under Hitler.”¹² After an internal leak, the news exploded not only throughout West Germany but also among its crucial Cold War allies, including France, Denmark, Canada, and the United States with headlines like “18 Percent Hail Hitler Era” and “Echo of Germany’s Nazi Past.”¹³ Not surprisingly, many West Germans did not take lightly to being compared to Hitler. Writing to the Chancellor’s Office, one man dismissed the results as “incomprehensible” and insisted that out of all his acquaintances – some 300–400 people – “I do not know a single one with that worldview!”¹⁴ And Uwe Barschel, the Schleswig-Holstein Interior Minister, lambasted the survey as an “insult to the German Volk.”¹⁵

The next year, the notorious Heidelberg Manifesto sprung to the forefront of public discourse. First published in the right-wing Deutsche Wochenzeitung, the manifesto cloaked racism in the guise of academic legitimacy, as it was signed by fifteen professors at major universities.¹⁶ “With great concern,” the professors wrote, “we observe the infiltration of the German Volk through an influx of millions of foreigners and their families, the infiltration of our language, our culture, and our traditions by foreign influences.” Describing the “spiritual identity” of the German Volk as based on an “occidental Christian heritage” and “common history,” they cast Turks, Muslims, and other “non-German foreigners” as fundamentally incompatible. Alongside this culturally based argument, however, was blatant biological racism reminiscent of eugenics and Hitler’s Mein Kampf. “In biological and cybernetic terms,” they continued, “peoples are living systems of a higher order with distinct system qualities that are passed on genetically and through tradition. The integration of large masses of non-German foreigners is therefore not possible without threatening the preservation of our people, and it will lead to the well-known ethnic catastrophes of multicultural societies.” Preempting criticism, they claimed to “oppose ideological nationalism, racism, and every form of right- and left-wing extremism” and asserted that their desire to “preserve the German Volk” was firmly rooted in the Basic Law. Despite this denial of racism, mainstream media condemned the manifesto for being full of “prejudices, banalities, barroom wisdom, and bombastic definitions” and stoking the fires of “nationalism” and “racism.”¹⁷

Also widely circulating at the time was a thirty-page pseudoscientific rant titled Ausländer-Integration ist Völkermord (Integrating Foreigners is Genocide), written by retired police chief Wolfgang Seeger in 1980. Eschewing the mainstream parties’ general definition of “integration” as a reciprocal process in which cultures could be preserved, Seeger criticized the term as a proxy for “assimilation” or “Germanization”: a “merging, melting, and mixing” of foreigners into the “body of the German Volk” that “contradicts the laws of nature.” Arguing that culture was determined by both “race” and “genetics,” he warned that Germany would devolve first into “racial conflict” and eventually, through sex and intermarriage, into a “Eurasian-Negroid future race.” All future offspring would be “half-bloods” (Mischlinge), he insisted, invoking the Nazi category codified in the 1935 Nuremberg Laws to denote certain Jews, Roma, and Black Germans whom the Nazis deemed genetically part-“Aryan.” The overall consequences would be a dual “genocide” (Völkermord) – not only of the German Volk but also of the foreigners. The only way to prevent this genocide was for the “simple man” and the “simple woman of our Volk” to protest through democratic means and write their representatives demanding that they send foreigners home.¹⁸

As the call “Turks out!” echoed throughout the country, policymakers began hardening their stance on how to solve the “Turkish problem.” In December 1981, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s SPD-FDP government proposed an “immigration ban” (Zuzugssperre) that would lower the upper age limit for foreign children whose parents resided in Germany from eighteen to sixteen.¹⁹ Two months later, return migration became the focus of a heated federal parliamentary debate, which transformed into a microcosm of the broader public reckoning with the existence, nature, and language of racism. The CDU/CSU opposition leader, Alfred Dregger, denied the feasibility of integrating Turks and expressed his party’s staunch commitment to promoting return migration. Despite the secularization of Turkish society, Turks’ “Muslim culture” and “distinct national pride” allegedly prevented them from being culturally “assimilated” or “Germanized,” and even socially “integrating” them into schools and jobs would be “difficult.” Promoting return migration validated the “natural and justified sentiment of our fellow citizens,” Dregger noted, and was “in no way immoral.” CDU/CSU representatives also proved eager to deny and deflect their racism altogether. “We have no reason to be accused of Ausländerfeindlichkeit by domestic or foreign critics when we insist that the Federal Republic should not become a country of immigration,” Dregger explained. The current popular outcry, added CSU representative Carl-Dieter Spranger, was not an expression of “nationalistic arrogance,” “racist incorrigibility,” or an “ausländerfeindlich attitude,” but rather a reaction to the failed policies of the SPD-FDP.

On the other hand, the SPD and FDP both tied the issue of return migration fundamentally to Ausländerfeindlichkeit, the legacy of the Third Reich, and the language of human rights and morality. SPD representative Hans-Eberhard Urbaniak opened the debate by asserting firmly: “We clearly and unambiguously reject any policy of ‘Foreigners out,’” and “We must all emphatically fight against Ausländerfeindlichkeit.” Although the SPD’s coalition partner did not necessarily reject the promotion of return migration in theory, FDP representative Friedrich Hölstein cautioned that convincing Turks to “voluntarily return” might result in a policy of “forced deportation.” Morally, such a policy would contradict West Germans’ “responsibility” to atone for their “national history” of Nazism and to uphold their Cold War commitment to “human rights and human dignity.” The optics alone would be detrimental, Hölstein asserted: “Do we really want to be internationally charged for violations of human rights? We, of all people, who continue to rightly point out human rights violations in the other part of Germany and throughout the world?”

Invigorated by the debate, the SPD-FDP government began developing a state-driven “campaign against Ausländerfeindlichkeit.”²⁰ Strikingly, the Federal Press Office’s proposed messaging strategy made no mention of migrants, let alone of the need to express sympathy toward them. Instead, it portrayed Ausländerfeindlichkeit as a threat to Germans: “Ausländerfeindlichkeit is immoral; we cannot afford to fall back into nationalistic thinking. Ausländerfeindlichkeit endangers inner peace and accordingly the democratic state. It damages our reputation and all of us.” As one staffer wrote, if the “caricature of the ‘beastly German’” resurfaced on the world stage, it would destroy the “hard-earned sympathy” that Germans had rebuilt over the past four decades.²¹ Although this coordinated public relations campaign never materialized, it demonstrates that West German policymakers envisioned the task of combatting Ausländerfeindlichkeit not only as self-serving but also as fundamentally connected to the memory – or forgetting – of the Nazi past.

Beyond surveys, media coverage, and parliamentary debates, however, understanding how ordinary Germans justified and expressed their own racism was – and is – no easy feat: they often criticized Turks privately, in passing, and in conversations with friends and family. But the West German government did have other sources they could examine, ones that testified more to everyday attitudes: letters they received from citizens. In fact, between 1980 and 1984, President Karl Carstens received no fewer than 202 letters from individual Germans complaining about foreigners and demanding – in one way or another – “Turks out!” Whether three-sentence postcards or ten-page rants, whether scribbled in illegible handwriting or meticulously typed, 50 percent of the writers complained about Turks explicitly, whereas other migrant groups – from Yugoslav guest workers to Vietnamese asylum seekers – were mentioned in fewer than five letters each. Although the letters ranged in tone from civil and matter-of-fact to irreverent and vulgar, the president’s aide tasked with reading them cataloged them under the all-encompassing label “Ausländerfeindlichkeit.” The lumping together of these diverse letters reveals that, for the aide, any criticism of Turks, no matter how mild, was indicative of Ausländerfeindlichkeit.

Analyzed together as a dataset, these letters are a crucial source for uncovering the bottom-up history of German racism in the early 1980s because, unlike surveys, they capture the specific patterns, nuances, and raw visceral emotion with which Germans expressed and attempted to justify their concerns about Turks.²² In fact, Christopher Molnar has examined another set of letters written to the subsequent president, Richard von Weizsäcker, in the early 1990s, coming to a similar conclusion about the persistence of biological racism and “apocalyptical fear.”²³ The letter writers’ names and addresses indicate that they were relatively evenly split by gender and lived all throughout the country, from cities to smaller towns. They were not politicians, journalists, intellectuals, or other elite shapers of public opinion. Nor do most of them come across as hardcore neo-Nazis hellbent on mass murdering foreigners and bringing about the restoration of the Third Reich, or even as voters of the right-wing National Democratic Party (NPD). Instead, to distance themselves from radical right-wing extremists, many identified themselves mundanely: a “concerned citizen,” “normal German,” “retired man,” “average woman,” “housewife,” or “elementary school student,” who believed in airing their grievances through formal democratic channels. Still, their alleged “ordinariness” demands scrutiny. On the one hand, the claim of being an “ordinary citizen” was a form of self-styling that helped these letter writers rhetorically distance their beliefs from those of right-wing extremists. On the other hand, many of them were likely the so-called Wutbürger, or angry citizens who regularly sent politicians scathing letters about various issues or public statements. In fact, many of these writers explicitly referenced a June 10, 1982, interview with Carstens, in which he stated that foreigners are our “fellow citizens” (Mitbürger) and called upon Germans to “thank foreigners for contributing to the welfare of our country,” to “help foreigners feel at home here,” and to “oppose all forms of Ausländerfeindlichkeit.”²⁴ Carstens’s statement had incensed them.

Collectively, the hundreds of letters to Carstens speak strongly to the silences, denial, and deflection surrounding not only the word Rassismus but also the allegedly more palatable word Ausländerfeindlichkeit. Strikingly, one-fourth of the writers – some fifty people – explicitly denied that they harbored racist or ausländerfeindlich views. A common strategy was to preface a long letter ranting about Turks and other migrants with variations on a simple phrase: “I’m not a racist, but…,” “I’m not an Ausländerfeind, but…,” “I’m not a right-winger, but…,” “I’m not an extremist, but….,” “I’m not a neo-Nazi, but…”²⁵ Many objected to the term Ausländerfeindlichkeit itself. Claiming that Ausländerfeindlichkeit was “overhyped” and little more than a “stupid buzzword,” several insisted that their concerns were a “reasonable critique of particular problematic developments” and a “justified rage.”²⁶ “Whenever someone stands up and expresses his concern about foreigner policy,” decried Jürgen Feucht, he is “immediately vilified as a ‘fascist’ or ‘neo-Nazi.’”²⁷ This “tactless” association, claimed Kurt Nagel, denigrated them into “unteachable, irredeemable, conservative reactionary people with narrow-minded prejudices or people who support political demagoguery.”²⁸ By differentiating themselves from neo-Nazis and right-wing extremists, these “ordinary” Germans deflected their guilt: they contended that their concerns, articulated through words rather than violence, were rational and justified.

Far more vividly than surveys alone, the letters to Carstens also reveal the multifaceted reasons why Germans opposed foreigners. By far the most important was the perception of foreigners’ culpability for Germany’s socioeconomic woes: half of the letters mentioned unemployment, while one-third mentioned guest workers’ perceived abuse of the social welfare system. Fred Reymund called all foreigners a “lazy Volk” and complained that West Germans “have to support the Third World.”²⁹ Irmtraud Wagner, a 61-year-old woman, asserted that Turks’ exploitation of the social welfare system made them wealthier than many German retirees, whose meager pensions left them “degraded into beggars.”³⁰ Two particularly inflammatory issues were family reunification and the child allowance benefit (Kindergeld), both of which had been consistent points of contention for the past decade.³¹ Alongside the image of the exploitative “welfare migrant,” nearly 20 percent of the letters referenced the changing neighborhoods and establishment of ethnically homogenous “Turkish ghettoes,” such as Berlin’s heavily Turkish neighborhood of Kreuzberg, and the challenges posed to the education system by the high percentages of migrant children.

Along with unemployment and alleged abuses of the social welfare system, perceived threats to public safety were another leading concern of letter writers. One-third referenced the migrants’ criminality, lamenting that West Germany had become a “paradise for criminals” and that the jails were filled with “criminal foreigners.”³² While these complaints focused primarily on drug trafficking, 10 percent centered on sexual violence – a crime that, due to longstanding Orientalist tropes, was particularly associated with Turkish and Middle Eastern men. Two elderly women, Ingeborg Hoffmann and Helma Zinkel, each noted that German women and girls could not walk down the street even in broad daylight because Turkish men viewed them as “prey.”³³ In the most troubling letter, a thirteen-year-old girl relayed her traumatic experience of being sexually assaulted by a group of Turkish teenagers who – “like they always do” – were loitering at a park after dark. Although she and her friend attempted to avoid “the group of foreigners,” they “came up to us and grabbed me, in order to flagrantly touch me.” The incident, the girl suggested, was not isolated, but rather characteristic of foreign men as a whole: “Have we reached the point in Germany that we, at thirteen years old, can no longer be outside at 7 o’clock at night without being molested by foreigners? … Pity, poor Germany!”³⁴ Given that no other children sent letters, it is possible that this letter was written by adults posing as a thirteen-year-old girl to draw the president’s attention to a particularly egregious case of sexual violation.

Twenty percent of the writers expressed cultural racism through condemning Turks’ Muslim faith. Far more harshly than simply pointing out that the two cultures were “different,” most of these writers took a particularly essentialist and racialized view of Islam, with Ingrid Eschkötter denigrating Turks as a “disgusting Mohammedan Volk” and another writer demanding that the government “Kick out the Turks, this Muslim scum!”³⁵ Only four of the writers mentioned headscarves – a reflection that the letters were written primarily by political centrists and conservatives rather than the leftist feminists who since the late 1970s had begun to condemn Muslim migrants’ perceived patriarchal treatment of women.³⁶ Instead, they portended a “fearsome” future of Germany’s “Islamicization by infinitely primitive Turks,” in which Germans would “burn the Bible and switch it out for the Koran!” and the Muslim call to prayer would “drown out the church bells.”³⁷ Muslims’ Halal dietary restrictions, they further contended, not only made them unwilling to eat Germany’s pork-based national cuisine but also posed a physical threat. As Georg Walter wrote, Turks “consider us Germans to be pork eaters, whom they can cheat, steal from, and even murder.” Recycling longstanding antisemitic tropes regarding the Jewish law of Kashrut, they insisted that the process of preparing Halal meat – ritually and humanely slaughtering the animal by cutting its throat and letting it bleed out – was a violent attack on innocent life that could lead to future violence. “They slaughter humans like they do sheep,” declared Ellie Schützeberg, a housewife and grandmother married to a retired police officer.³⁸

In associating Islam with primitivity and violence, several writers reiterated Orientalist tropes rooted in the centuries-old Ottoman-Habsburg conflicts. They warned that Germans would soon suffer the “downfall of the Occident,” succumb to the rule of “Christian slaughterers” and the “plundering Volk from the empire of Allah,” and be inundated by “Mustafas, Mohameds, and Ali Babas” walking around in “Oriental robes.”³⁹ The fear of the Turks exists “everywhere where Turks show up in large masses,” one man stated matter-of-factly, imploring Carstens to “think of the Mohács, the entire Balkans, and Vienna.”⁴⁰ The 1683 Battle of Vienna, when the Ottoman army stormed the gates of the Habsburg capital, proved a particularly powerful reference point. “Did the friendship with the Turks begin 300 years ago at the gates of Vienna?” Heinz Schambach quipped, while Berta Maier suggested that Süleyman II, the Ottoman emperor during the 1683 battle, would be “rolling in his grave because he hadn’t come up with the idea of guest workers.”⁴¹ Georg Kretschmer emphasized Ottoman violence in the modern era, recalling the 1915–1916 Armenian Genocide in which “the Turks tried to exterminate the Armenians with the most brutal of methods.”⁴² The irony that the legal definition of genocide would not have existed without Germans’ having perpetrated the Holocaust was lost on them.

These socioeconomic concerns and cultural racism were compounded by the increase in asylum seekers migrating to West Germany in the early 1980s.⁴³ Lambasting asylum seekers as criminals, many of the writers argued that they were “fake asylum seekers” (Scheinasylanten) or “economic refugees” (Wirtschaftsflüchtlinge) who lied about their political persecution in order to seek jobs in West Germany and exploit the country’s welfare system. Criticism of asylum seekers applied most harshly to the thousands of Turkish citizens, predominantly Kurds, who applied for asylum following Turkey’s September 1980 military coup. Most of the writers conflated asylum seekers and guest workers from Turkey into one homogenous category of migrants who, as one writer pointed out, wanted to turn West Germany into a “hotbed for the expansion of Greater Turkey.”⁴⁴

For 10 percent of the writers, the “Turkish problem” was inextricable from the Cold War context. Several facetiously asserted that even East German dictatorship and poverty was preferable to the large proportion of foreigners in West Germany, although such statements erased the thousands of contract workers and asylum seekers living in East Germany. “It’s probably nicer to live in the GDR than in our own country among Asians and Africans,” scribbled Ernst Bender on a three-sentence postcard, while Ellie Schützeberg concurred: “I’d prefer to go back to the GDR, which I left 39 years ago and where I would be protected and safe from this Türkenvolk.”⁴⁵ Volker Arendt from Iserslohn contended that reunification could only be achieved if Germans on both sides of the Berlin Wall embraced “the feeling that we are a nation with a collective past, culture, and language,” noting that a high proportion of foreigners “without any connection” to the other part of Germany would impede this process.⁴⁶ Ottilie Vogel, an elderly woman, put it even more blatantly: “GDR citizens do not want reunification with an Orientalized FRG.”⁴⁷

The letters also reflect Germans’ efforts to distance themselves from the Nazi past. A remarkable 20 percent of the letters referenced Hitler, Nazism, and World War II. To support their claim that they were not right-wing extremists or neo-Nazis, several of the elderly writers emphasized that they had resisted the Third Reich. Peter Bursch claimed that he had been “thrown out” of the Hitler Youth and had only fought in World War II because he was a “good soldier” and the war “was about Germany, not about Hitler.”⁴⁸ Another denied that he was a “right-wing pig” by claiming that he had been an “iron antifascist,” that his two best friends were Jews, and that his own great-grandfather had been Jewish. In another selective interpretation of the past, some writers criticized Turks in relation to postwar narratives of German victimhood. Twenty percent rejected the argument that Germans should thank guest workers for helping rebuild the country after World War II. Alfred Gonska from Essen, who boasted that he had participated in “clearing the rubble” of cities that had been bombed into “debris and ashes,” insisted that the task of Germany’s rebuilding was undertaken by “all Germans, and only Germans, under unspeakably immense sacrifices and difficulties and with great idealism.”⁴⁹ Several writers also compared guest workers and asylum seekers to the twelve million ethnic German expellees (Heimatvertriebene) who fled Eastern Europe for Germany in 1945.⁵⁰ Identifying herself as an expellee, Elisabeth Stellma complained that today’s migrants were receiving too generous treatment even though they were not ethnically Germany: “Back then, no one cared if we had nothing to eat.”⁵¹

On the other hand, the letters also demonstrated continuities of Nazi ideology and terminology. Georg Kretschmer criticized migrants for West Germany’s perceived overpopulation by invoking the Nazi phrase “Volk without space” (Volk ohne Raum), while three other writers used the highly taboo term “living space” (Lebensraum), the Nazi ideology that justified expansion, war, and genocide in terms of an existential need to secure land, food, and natural resources for “Aryan” Germans.⁵² Several others, including 70-year-old Irmgard Recke, mentioned “Rump Germany” (Restdeutschland) – a rhyming play on the German word for West Germany (Westdeutschland) – which, in the early Cold War decades, opponents of Germany’s division had used to criticize West Germany as the meager leftover half of Germany following the break-off of the GDR.⁵³ But the term “Rump Germany” had a deeper history. After World War I, “Rump Germany” became a rallying cry against the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which stripped the former German Empire of 13 percent of its European territories and all its overseas colonies. As the desire to restore “Rump Germany” to “Greater Germany” became central to the Nazi expansionism, invoking the term during the Cold War reflected nostalgia for the Third Reich.⁵⁴

A striking continuity to eugenics was the persistence of biological racism, dehumanizing language, judgments based on skin color, and the term “race” (Rasse) itself. Overwhelmingly, the writers who invoked the language of “race” tended to be elderly retirees, who had lived through the Third Reich and had been indoctrinated into Nazi ideology. Germany did not just have a “foreigner problem,” explained Dieter Baumann from Würzheim, but rather a “racial problem” (Rassenproblem) caused by “colored” (farbige) migrants.⁵⁵ Wilhelmine Richtscheid, a retired woman from Münster, cast Turkish nationality as a skin color and railed against “yellow, brown, black, and Turkish” asylum seekers.⁵⁶ A former World War II soldier, Werner Weber, complained that Turks were a “hard to discipline race” and warned against the “yellow danger” (gelbe Gefahr) of Vietnamese asylum seekers.⁵⁷ After fleeing East Germany’s socialist dictatorship in 1949, Hedwig Kubatta bemoaned that she was now forced to live together with “Negroes, Turks, and other half-apes.”⁵⁸

The letters also included defamatory tropes surrounding “race-mixing” (Rassenmischung), a eugenic concept that the Nazis had taken to the extreme in the 1935 Nuremberg Laws that banned sexual relations between Jews and “Aryans” and categorized part-“Aryans” as “half-bloods” (Mischlinge). Although only one of the writers explicitly mentioned the Nuremberg Laws’ criminal category of “racial defilement” (Rassenschande), several cautioned against the perils of sexual reproduction between individuals of “different Völker and Rassen,” which posed the “danger that individual races would be destroyed.”⁵⁹ Two of the writers who invoked the most blatant Nazi terminologies, Hedwig Kubatta and Georg Kretschmer, contended that Germany had already become a “dirty Mischvolk” and asserted that integrating foreigners was “unnatural” because “God did not put any Mischvölker on this earth.”⁶⁰ In particularly eugenic and dehumanizing language, 80-year-old Hugo Gebhard warned that if “various skin colors and face shapes” came to West Germany, the country would devolve into a “zoological garden” that, just like the “mixed society” (Mischgesellschaft) of the United States, would be plagued by “race riots” (Rassenunruhen).⁶¹ Jürgen Feucht and Heinz Schambach both invoked the term “Eurasian-Negroid future race” (eurasisch-negroiden Zukunftsrasse), directly citing Seeger’s pamphlet “Integrating Foreigners is Genocide.”⁶² In this sense, several insisted that their opposition to Turks was not a matter of racism or Ausländerfeindlichkeit but rather a “natural” and “very healthy” “self-preservation instinct.”⁶³

Further mobilizing Seeger’s inflammatory rhetoric of “genocide,” many writers argued that “race-mixing” threatened the “biological downfall of one’s own Volk.”⁶⁴ These fears were particularly common among the 25 percent of writers who criticized migrants’ high birthrates. Berta Maier, one of the most vociferous critics, complained that Turkish women – with their “wombs always full” and their children “multiplying like mushrooms” – were committing an “embryo mass murder” or a “new style of genocide” against Germans.⁶⁵ Turning the blame on West Germans themselves, Bernhard Machemer from Osthofen said that West Germans were committing a “Volk suicide” (Volkssuizid) by allowing themselves to become the “modern slaves of the foreigners.”⁶⁶ Seven letters invoked the parallel term “extermination” (Ausrottung), with two directly referencing the genocide of Native Americans perpetrated by Europeans conquering the Americas. Only one letter, from Alfred Kolbe of Nuremberg, alluded to Germans’ “genocide” or “extermination” of Jews, but it did so in a way that absolved Germans of guilt: “This is the fate of the German Volk, just as what happened to the Jewish Volk.”⁶⁷

Showing no remorse for the victims, 5 percent of the writers blamed the “Turkish problem” on Jews and Roma, the latter of whom they continued to stigmatize as “Gypsies” (Zigeuener). Sigismund Stucke, who expressed his strong commitment to protecting the “still existing German Reich,” demanded that the government hold a popular referendum on a simple yes-or-no question: whether “Jews and other foreigners” should be allowed to stay in West Germany.⁶⁸ Rudolf Okun from Hunfeld argued that mass migration was a conspiracy concocted by an amorphous “world Jewry” (Weltjüdentum) that, invoking the derogatory Yiddish term for non-Jews, sought to “destroy all goyim.”⁶⁹ Reflecting the connection between Islamophobia and anti-Zionism, one writer argued that “the current anti-Turkish Ausländerfeindlichkeit is actually an act of revenge by the state of Israel” and by the entire “Jewish race.” Several, moreover, demanded that Germany “kick out the Gypsy gangs,” who were “murderers,” “gang robbers,” and “parasites.”⁷⁰ Turkish children, ranted Ilse Vogel, were so unkempt that they “look like Gypsy children,” while Georg Walter warned that “Germany is on its way to becoming a motley international Gypsy Volk.”⁷¹

Expressing varying degrees of Holocaust denial and revisionism, Heinz Schambach and several other writers condemned the “guilt complex” (Schuldkomplex) or “collective guilt thesis” (Kollektivschuldthese), which portrayed all Germans as culpable for Nazism. Jürgen Feucht railed against the media’s “endlessly prostituted” rhetoric of “previously-we-murdered-six-million-Jews-and-now-the-foreigners-are-next,” while Robert Streit complained that the current media was “worse than under [Joseph] Goebbels,” the Nazi propaganda minister.⁷² Calling the widely broadcasted 1979 miniseries Holocaust a “fictional, lying hate film” (Hetzfilm), Margarete Völkl complained that the fixation on the “so-called ‘German past’” was denigrating Germans as “immoral, criminal, horrible, and ausländerfeindlich.” She further espoused a frequent neo-Nazi rallying cry: demanding the release of Nazi Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess, now eighty-eight years old, who had been serving life in prison since 1945. Hess, Völkl cried, was “innocent,” his family was “suffering greatly,” and his imprisonment was “inhumane!”⁷³ Yet, in one of the most unconvincing denials of racism, she questioned: “Why do they have to call us Nazis?”

From complaints about unemployment, to racialized and Orientalist criticism of Islam, to blatant Holocaust denial, the wide range of opinions in these letters reveals the nuances and patterns of West German racism in the early 1980s. Despite attempting to justify their criticism as “rational” and “legitimate,” these self-proclaimed “ordinary Germans” inadvertently exposed themselves as harboring the same racial prejudices that they tried to suppress. Emphasizing cultural racism alone belies that 10 percent of them displayed biological racism: they invoked Nazi terminology, ranted about inferior “races,” decried “race-mixing,” and bemoaned the “biological downfall,” “genocide,” or “extermination” of the German Volk. They denied or downplayed the Holocaust and denigrated Jews and Roma as connected to – and even responsible for – the “Turkish problem.” While not a single writer praised Hitler, drew a swastika, or tied themselves directly to organized neo-Nazism, they had clearly absorbed the messages of sensationalist mainstream media and right-wing extremist tracts. And the knowledge that policymakers were drafting a law to promote guest workers’ return migration normalized their racism as politically legitimate.

Everyday Racism and Anti-Racist Activism

Racism, however, was also an everyday phenomenon and a collective experience, with real material and physical consequences for Turkish migrants. But crucially, the migrants fought back. If the early 1980s saw a rise in racism, then they also witnessed an attendant rise in anti-racist activism. Although Turks’ anti-racist activism has generally been underacknowledged in the memory of the guest worker program, it is important to emphasize that Turkish migrants played an active role in the racial reckoning of the 1980s, challenging West German society to confront uncomfortable and silenced truths. Both individually and collectively, they worked to defend themselves against both structural and everyday racism. Forms of racism ranged from anti-Turkish jokes and slurs to discriminatory treatment in workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods and – importantly for this book – the drafting of the 1983 remigration law. Anti-racism, like racism itself, took many shapes.⁷⁴ It was usually peaceful but sometimes violent. It was public and private, loud and quiet, political and personal. It was a matter of looking outward and searching inward. Ultimately, everyone had their own relationship to anti-racist activism, guided by common but sometimes unspoken goals: improving their status, securing better treatment in their everyday lives, and staking a claim to membership in West German society while still maintaining ties to home.

In the overall memory of the racial reckoning of the early 1980s, one of the most striking and powerful anti-racist protests is the case of the young Turkish-German poet Semra Ertan (Figure 4.2). Born and raised in the port city of Mersin on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, Ertan had migrated to Kiel in 1971 at the age of fifteen to reunite with her parents, both of whom were guest workers of Alevi background. As she entered adulthood, leveraging her language skills to write poetry and work as a German-Turkish interpreter, she felt growing estrangement from both countries. While poetry provided a creative outlet to privately express her concerns, she turned to public anti-racist activism. Her many hunger strikes, however, had gone unnoticed. In a final attempt to bring attention to racism, she resorted to committing suicide publicly. On May 24, 1982, just one week before her twenty-sixth birthday, she doused herself with five liters of gasoline and set herself on fire in the middle of a busy street corner in Hamburg. Although a police officer rushed to smother the flames with blanket, she died in the hospital two days later.

Figure 4.2 Semra Ertan, Turkish-German poet and anti-racism activist, ca. 1980. Ertan brought transnational attention to West Germans’ mistreatment of Turks when she committed suicide publicly in protest in Hamburg.

© Bilir-Meier Family Archive, used with permission.

The suicide of Semra Ertan is a powerful reminder that Turkish migrants’ experiences of racism were – all at once – personal, public, and politicized, with effects that crossed national borders. Calculated and deliberate, Ertan intended for both Germans and Turks to understand her suicide as an act of anti-racism. To ensure that her message spread, she had notified two of West Germany’s largest news outlets ahead of time. One reporter rushed to speak with her. In their interview, later printed verbatim in newspapers in both West Germany and Turkey, she made her protest clear. “The Germans should be ashamed of themselves,” she insisted. “In 1961, they said, ‘Welcome, guest workers.’ If we all went back, who would do the dirty work? … And even if they did, who would work for such a low wage? They would certainly say: No, I would not work for such a low wage.” She concluded powerfully: “I want foreigners not only to have the right to live like human beings, but rather to also have the right to be treated like human beings. That is all. I want people to love and accept themselves. And I want them to think about my death.”⁷⁵

Ertan’s call to action, however, was hotly contested both within and across borders. Reflecting the broader debates over racism, Ertan’s suicide elicited mixed responses from West German politicians. While local SPD and Green Party representatives admitted that Turks were facing a “concrete threat” that could “move in the direction of pogroms,” a CDU representative cautioned against “generalizing” Ertan’s case, since the “overwhelming majority of Germans do not hate foreigners.”⁷⁶ Ignoring her anti-racist motivation entirely, Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher dismissed her suicide as “an act of desperation,” while the State Interior Minister of Schleswig-Holstein called her a “victim of her own problems.”⁷⁷ To be sure, Ertan had struggled greatly with her mental health, and she had previously attempted suicide. For politicians, however, emphasizing her mental health problems served the political purpose of deflecting attention away from racism. Such victim-blaming not only repeated gendered tropes of female psychiatric problems, but also reflected a pervasive tendency to attribute the “Turkish problem” to Turks’ alleged unwillingness to integrate rather than to West Germany’s lack of any comprehensive policy to integrate them.

In Turkey, observers were far more eager to emphasize Ertan’s suicide as an anti-racism protest. Whereas West German reports of the suicide faded after several days, Turkish newspaper coverage persisted for weeks on end, condemning West German politicians’ dismissive responses. In a Milliyet interview, her father attributed her suicide to West German policy, rightly pointing out that just two weeks before her suicide, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt had announced that foreigners should either integrate into Germany or go home.⁷⁸ Hürriyet published a multi-page feature on how her suicide had affected her friends, neighbors, and family in her Turkish home city of Mersin, juxtaposing photographs of her repatriated casket with those of her happy childhood before she followed her parents to Germany, where “the true tragedy began.”⁷⁹

The week after her suicide, Hürriyet published a short blurb urging Turks in Germany to write directly to the West German president. Hürriyet’s sample letter, printed in both languages, read: “We as members of the Turkish minority who have been working in Germany for many years deplore the recent events. We are suffering the most under unemployment, and Ausländerfeindlichkeit threatens our very existence. The aggressors are known, but no action is taken against them. On the other hand, we also pay taxes and contribute to Germany’s welfare. Is ‘peace’ not our right? Our request to you is to urgently pass a law against Ausländerfeindlichkeit.”⁸⁰ The call resonated broadly. The president’s office received fifty-six letters with the verbatim text, one of which had twenty-six signatories, while a dozen others wrote their own messages. Reflecting the importance of Ertan’s suicide, one attached the Hürriyet newspaper article about the funeral in Mersin, while others noted that “a woman in Hamburg set herself on fire” and that “there are others like Semra.”⁸¹ Most extremely, one woman threatened: “If this situation does not change immediately, then I too will set myself on fire in the middle of the street like Semra Ertan, because we are sick and tired of this horrible treatment and we want to be free of it.”⁸²

As these letters reflect, Ertan’s suicide resonated so deeply and personally not only because of sympathy toward her as a young woman, but also because her protest spoke to a collective everyday experience of anti-Turkish racism. Even when simply walking down the streets, the migrants had metaphorical targets on their backs. Speaking Turkish, or speaking German with a Turkish accent, was an audible marker of difference. And West Germans’ racialization of Turks as predominantly dark-skinned with so-called “Mediterranean,” “Oriental,” or “Asiatic” features made many migrants – especially women and girls who wore headscarves – visually identifiable even before they spoke. Some migrants, however, recalled that they experienced less overt discrimination because they were able to racially “pass” as German due to their blonde hair and blue eyes.⁸³ One girl also explained that because her parents came from Istanbul, were educated, and were “western-minded,” she was better able to fit in socially and culturally with Germans.⁸⁴ Nevertheless, because Germans tended to homogenize Turks as coming from predominantly rural areas, Turks’ ability “pass” on the basis of urban origins was limited.

Germans verbally assaulted them with racist slurs, whether screaming at them across the street or mumbling quietly on streetcars. Besides more generic hateful names like “shit Turks” (Scheiß-Türken) and “Turkish pigs” (Türken-Schweine), these slurs also reflected age-old Orientalist stereotypes. Especially common were insults like “camel driver” (Kameltreiber), “garlic eaters” (Knoblauchfresser), and “cumin Turk” (Kümmeltürken), which associated Turks not only with the seemingly “exotic” foods that they brought to West Germany’s otherwise bland culinary scene, but also with backwardness and underdevelopment. Increasingly throughout the 1980s, the racial slur Kanaken – which Germans had applied since the early twentieth century to an evolving variety of primarily working-class migrant populations from Southern and Eastern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East – became nearly exclusively associated with Turks.⁸⁵

Alongside foreboding signs banning them from entering German businesses, migrants also confronted racist graffiti spray-painted by organized neo-Nazis or just rowdy teenagers looking for a laugh. In one iconic photograph taken in Berlin-Kreuzberg, a Turkish man named Ali Topaloğlu and his two young nieces walk somberly past graffiti that states “Turks out!” (Türken raus!).⁸⁶ Given the strong emotions that this image evoked, it was reprinted in media outlets throughout West Germany, including on the front page of Metall, the publication of the metalworkers’ trade union. The proliferation of such images in the mass media and through migrant networks ensured that guest workers and their children knew about this graffiti even if they had not directly confronted it. Especially disturbing was that anti-Turkish graffiti was often accompanied by swastikas, which visually implied that Turks and other “foreigners” were destined to a similar fate as Jews. Amid the public reckoning with how the resurgence of neo-Nazism threatened both public order and the very project of liberal democracy itself, the Turkish-Jewish comparison threatened not only migrants but also West German society.

The so-called Turkish jokes (Türkenwitze) put migrants at further unease.⁸⁷ Reflecting the stereotype that Turks often worked in “dirty” jobs like garbage collectors, street cleaners, and construction workers, one joke questioned: “Why are some garbage cans made of glass? So that even Turks have a window to look out of.” In dehumanizing and misogynistic language, another joke went: “What is the difference between a Turkish woman and a pig? One wears a headscarf.” The most common jokes, however, made light of death and even murder. Many directly alluded to the Holocaust, particularly the murder of Jews in the gas chambers:

What is the difference between a Turk and the median on the Autobahn? You can’t drive over the median.

What is a misfortune? When a ship full of Turks sinks. What is a catastrophe? When a Turk survives.

Have you heard that Turks carry a knife all the time? Between their shoulder blades and ten centimeters deep.

Have you seen the latest microwave oven? There’s room in it for a whole family of Turks.

How many Turks fit in a Volkswagen? A hundred! Four on the seats, and the rest in the ashtray!

A trainload of Turks leaves Istanbul but arrives in Hamburg empty. How come? It came by way of Auschwitz.

The German scholar Richard Albrecht, writing at the time, interpreted these jokes as revealing the latent racism among the mainstream German population.⁸⁸ Equally important to understand, however, is the sheer impact that these hateful words had on the migrants themselves.

Jokes, slurs, and bullying were especially common – and traumatic – for children. Everyday contact with German classmates, teachers, and school administrators was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, many Turkish children achieved academic success, built strong relationships with their teachers and classmates, and viewed school fondly. On the other hand, schools were also sites of racist encounters that left children wavering between belonging and rejection. In one particularly blatant example of West Germans using the language of “race” and “race-mixing,” a German mother attempted to enroll her half-Turkish son in a German international school during a stay abroad, but the principal immediately rejected them, noting abruptly: “Sorry, but in our kindergarten, we only accept pure-blooded (reinrassige) children.”⁸⁹ Especially hurtful was when racism came from the mouths of their peers, who often reiterated their parents’ condemnation of Turks. When an eleven-year-old girl named Nirgül walked into her fourth-grade classroom for the first time, she was greeted with jeers. “Eww, we have another Turk,” her classmates complained, refusing to sit next to her, while one boy insisted, “I have to be a meter away from a Turk.”⁹⁰ Of course, there were instances in which German classmates attempted to intervene on behalf of their Turkish friends – but the bullies typically pressed on. “Even if you scream at them,” one German high schooler complained, “they still are not convinced … I don’t think they know that it hurts his feelings.”⁹¹

Given the rising attention to Holocaust education in the 1980s, schools also provided a space for Turkish children to contextualize their personal experiences of racism within the longer-term continuities of Germany’s Nazi past.⁹² Although they did not have personal or family connections to the Third Reich, they were able to draw parallels to their own experiences. One Turkish girl named Çiğdem, who later returned to Turkey with her parents, recalled how sitting in the classroom with German students and learning about their grandparents’ crimes proved crucial to her journey of self-discovery. While learning about the Nazis’ persecution of Jews, Çiğdem “realized that we Turks are affected exactly the same way and are next in line.” Comparing her experience to the Holocaust also provided her with a new weapon in her arsenal to fight back. When one of her elderly neighbors screamed that she was a “stinking Turk,” she became so angry that she called him a “Jew eater” (Judenfresser).⁹³

Turkish migrants had legitimate reason to fear that hateful words might turn into physical – or fatal – violence. The media regularly covered the concurrent rise in organized neo-Nazism and neo-Nazi violence. Their fears were heightened by the well-publicized shooting at the Twenty Five discotheque in Nuremberg, an establishment that was often frequented by foreigners and people of color. On June 24, 1982, the twenty-six-year-old West German neo-Nazi Helmut Oxner pulled out a high-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver and started shooting at people on the dancefloor. He murdered two African-American men – one a civilian, and one a military sergeant – and near fatally injured a Korean woman and a Turkish waiter. After fleeing the discotheque, he pulled out another gun and proceeded to shoot with two guns at foreigners passing by on the sidewalk. There, he murdered an Egyptian exchange student and crushed the jaw of a man from Libya. Before turning the gun on himself, Oxner shouted, “I only shoot at Turks!”⁹⁴ Oxner had been known by police: just two days before, he and another neo-Nazi had anonymously telephoned the police station, lambasting Turks and Jews as “camel drivers,” “foreigner pigs,” and “Jew pigs.”

In the weeks immediately following the shooting, leading West German newspapers emphasized the pervasiveness of anti-Turkish physical violence throughout the country, tying together smaller incidents into a narrative of rising danger. This “everyday violence,” as Die Zeit put it, was no longer exceptional: “Not a day goes by without news of bloody attacks against a minority that was once enthusiastically invited.”⁹⁵ In Hamburg, Der Spiegel reported, Turkish teachers were “terrorized” with death threats. In Berlin, two men accosted a Turkish man in the subway, remarking that “previously something like that would have been gassed.” In Munich, two other men stabbed a Turkish teenager in the throat with a broken beer bottle, shouting that he was a “foreigner pig that belongs in Dachau.” In Witten, a wall was defaced with graffiti warning: “The Jews have it behind them, the Turks still in front of them.”⁹⁶ In Frankfurt, a German man horrifically threw a three-year-old Turkish girl into a trashcan because, in his words, “the filthy people (Dreckvolk) must go.” At the core of these discussions was a central question, which struck at the heart of West Germany’s broader racial reckoning: were the culprits all neo-Nazis and skinheads, or were they also ordinary people unaffiliated with extremist groups? For Der Spiegel, the answer was clear: this violence was “in no way” perpetrated only by “organized neo-Nazis.”

Rather than acquiesce to racist rhetoric and violence, Turks engaged in varying forms of anti-racist activism, which operated on a spectrum from peaceful protest to the formation of violent gangs. As early as the 1970s, Turks living in the slums – or what Germans denigrated as “Turkish ghettos” – banded together into gangs to defend themselves.⁹⁷ As the West German Embassy in Ankara put it in 1982, these gangs functioned as “self-protection organizations”: “I wouldn’t be surprised if the Turks began to fight back,” wrote one embassy official forebodingly, which he feared could lead to “blood vengeance” (Blutrache).⁹⁸ One of the most prominent of these gangs was the 36 Boys, founded in 1987 in West Berlin’s heavily Turkish district of Kreuzberg, often called “Little Istanbul” (Figure 4.3). In a 2005 interview, a former member of the 36 Boys named Ali explained that he joined at age twelve because he knew many of the members and craved a sense of community. Embracing African-American culture, Ali and his friends went to rap and hip-hop parties, learned how to breakdance, and sprayed graffiti art on walls.⁹⁹ But, on the darker side, Ali also recalled many nights out on the streets with his fellow gang members fighting neo-Nazis and watching his friends die from stab wounds.¹⁰⁰ Turkish gang violence rose in the early 1990s, as a means of defense against the onslaught of neo-Nazi attacks after reunification.¹⁰¹ Although West German media coverage acknowledged the justification of self-defense, they tended to place the blame primarily on Turkish gangs themselves, even though German neo-Nazis and right-wing extremists were responsible for instigating the violence and posed a greater threat.¹⁰²

Figure 4.3 Members of the prominent Turkish gang 36 Boys in Berlin-Kreuzberg proudly stand in front of “36” graffiti, 1990.

© Ergun Çagatay/Fotoarchiv Ruhr Museum/Stadtmuseum Berlin/Stiftung Historische Museen Hamburg, used with permission.

Far more often, however, the fight against racism was peaceful. Turkish workers overwhelmingly chose the pen over the sword, lobbying their political representatives and labor union leaders. In March 1982, for example, Turkish mineworkers in Gelsenkirchen wrote a scathing letter to the president of the Industrial Union of Mining and Energy (IGBE). When reading an article in the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet, the workers were shocked that the newspaper had quoted the mine’s director as being “very satisfied with the performance of the Turks.” Appalled at the director’s seeming disingenuousness, the workers complained: “How is something like that even possible at our mine? Here we are despised and suppressed, and we suffer under Ausländerfeindlichkeit.”¹⁰³ Within the past year, four of their Turkish colleagues, including one with a disability, had been brutally beaten by Germans on the job. That year, the IGBE president also received a letter from a Turkish union member who, without using the word “race,” invoked the legacy of Nazism and worried that the past might repeat itself. Germans, he explained, viewed foreigners as a “threat to the pure German culture” and as a “problem that was waiting for its final solution (Endlösung).” Both politicians and academics, he wrote after the Heidelberg Manifesto’s publication, were striving to create “a clean world of ‘blue-eyed and blonde-haired people.’”¹⁰⁴

Neighborhoods and apartments were also sites of protests against discriminatory local ordinances.¹⁰⁵ One particularly well-publicized incident took place in the district of Merkenich in the outskirts of Cologne, where during the 1960s, Turkish migrants had built their own houses on the largely abandoned Causemannstraße. By 1981, twenty-eight families were living there, frequently receiving threatening letters from the district government commanding them to leave as part of a broader effort to gentrify the district and rid it of Turks. Overnight in August 1982, while many of these families were on vacation in Turkey, the Cologne city government sent construction workers to tear down five houses. In a flyer that circulated throughout Cologne, the migrants maintained that all they had done was attempt to make “their own homes, simple wood and stone houses, almost a small village with vegetable gardens, courtyards, and pergolas,” with places for children to play and where “men and women can maintain the sociability and hospitality they are accustomed to at home undisturbed by German landlords.” Tearing down the five houses, they asserted, was an act of Ausländerfeindlichkeit on the part of the municipal government.¹⁰⁶

Turks also took to the streets to peacefully protest, often joined by sympathetic Germans. In November 1982, the local Protestant pastor in Gelsenkirchen worked alongside Turkish residents to organize a large “protest against Ausländerfeindlichkeit,” which attracted 500 demonstrators. This protest came in response to a spate of neo-Nazi violence that occurred in early November, the same week as the 44th anniversary of Kristallnacht. The Gelsenkirchen attack saw neo-Nazis ignite a fire at the office of the local Turkish workers association, spraypaint racist graffiti and swastikas on some two dozen storefronts owned by migrants, and send death threats to Turkish workers.”¹⁰⁷ The pastor defended the migrants: “They are not ‘Kanaken,’ they are not ‘pigs’… They are not ‘overrunning us … They are not ‘infiltrating’ us.”¹⁰⁸ He insisted that combatting Ausländerfeindlichkeit began first and foremost with Germans themselves. Germans, he cautioned, should not “bite our tongues when harmful, false words want to come out of our lips,” nor should they continue to “laugh at jokes about foreigners.” Importantly, amid the rise of Holocaust memory in the 1980s, these protests sometimes directly referenced the Holocaust, with Turks overtly comparing their situation to that of Jews during the Third Reich (Figures 4.4 and 4.5).

Figure 4.4 Young Turkish protesters march with a banner that states: “We do not want to be the Jews of tomorrow,” 1981.

© picture alliance/dpa, used with permission.

Figure 4.5 Protesters somberly hold yellow Stars of David, which the Nazis forced Jews to wear, to draw a powerful visual connection between past and present persecution, 1982. Written in the stars are “asylum seeker,” “foreigner,” and “Jew,” although it is unclear whether the individuals holding the signs belong to those respective groups.

© Deutsche Fotothek/Martin Langer, used with permission.

Protests of this sort, however, also revealed the fissures between Turks and Germans – or what Jennifer A. Miller has called “imperfect solidarities.”¹⁰⁹ Like in the Gelsenkirchen case above, protests were frequently organized by Germans, with relatively minimal input and participation from Turkish migrants. So, too, were protests often performative, with even the most well-meaning of German demonstrators taking to the streets without working to dismantle the elements of structural racism. One particularly striking example occurred in 1991 amid the wave of neo-Nazi violence after reunification in the heavily Turkish city of Duisburg. There, some two hundred people demonstrated in a silent march in the middle of a hailstorm, carrying signs with catchy slogans, such as “People eat gyros and döner kebab, so why do they try to get rid of the cook?” and “Do we only need foreigners for German garbage disposal?”¹¹⁰ However, this protest was organized on the initiative of German doctors, nurses, and social workers at a local hospital without consulting any migrants, and both German and Turkish passersby appeared disinterested. In fact, one Turkish representative on the Duisburg’s Foreigner Council (Ausländerbeirat) even questioned why so few Turks were willing to participate alongside Germans.¹¹¹

Ultimately, examining Turks’ anti-racist activism reveals that – just like in matters of determining who counted as “German” – West Germans did not have a singular claim to reckoning with racism. And, just like racism itself, anti-racist activism existed on a spectrum. The case of Semra Ertan, who publicly set herself on fire in protest, is a powerful reminder not only of just how deeply racism was embedded in migrants’ psyches but also of the sheer frustration and desperation that many migrants felt. To be sure, not all migrants who engaged in forms of protest considered themselves political activists. Rather, fighting back against both structural and everyday racism – whether in workplaces, schools, or neighborhoods – was often simply a matter of everyday necessity to improve their living conditions and prevent further discriminatory acts. That some Germans leapt to Turks’ defense provides an encouraging counterpart to others’ blatant racism. Still, moments of solidarity proved fraught. When Germans defended Turks, they did so not necessarily out of sympathy for migrants, but mostly to mount a show of strength against the rising tide of right-wing extremism and neo-Nazism. Germans’ allyship thus slipped into what feminist scholar Linda Alcoff has called “the problem of speaking for others,” whereby “the practice of privileged persons speaking for or on behalf of less privileged persons has actually resulted (in many cases) in increasing and reinforcing the oppression of the group spoken for.”¹¹² Enjoying comfort in public space, and safe from the threat of retribution, Germans – despite their best intentions – drowned out the voices of the migrants themselves.

Turkey’s 1980 Coup, Human Rights, and Holocaust Memory

As performativity eclipsed real change, it became up to those in the home country to defend the migrants against the forces of hate. As news of a possible remigration law spread in the early 1980s, the racial reckoning echoed abroad, enflaming bilateral tensions with Turkey. The Turkish government staunchly opposed the proposed remigration law not only for policy reasons, as it blatantly contradicted Turkey’s financially based opposition to the guest workers’ return, but also as a matter of political strategy and principle. While Turkish officials did not always act in the migrants’ best interests, they envisioned themselves – at least outwardly – as the protectors of their mistreated citizens abroad. Turkish media outlets and ordinary citizens also rushed to the migrants’ defense, even though they simultaneously ostracized the migrants as “Germanized.” Generalizing all Germans as inherently racist, Turkish critics accused them of violating the migrants’ human rights and drew direct comparisons to the Nazi past: Turks were the new Jews, Schmidt was the new Hitler, and the 1980s had become the 1930s. The Holocaust thus became a usable past for Turks, one that could be deployed in debates about return migration or used, alternatively, to whitewash Turkey’s own past and present abuses against minority groups.

But this rhetoric was accompanied by a great irony: it occurred in the immediate aftermath of the September 12, 1980, military coup, when Turkey’s authoritarian government became the target of international scorn for committing egregious human rights violations against political dissidents, Kurds, and other minority populations. The coup was a major turning point in Turkey’s relationship with Europe, as it brought Turkey’s status as a “European” country into question and strained its relations with the EEC. Just three weeks after the coup, both West Germany and France introduced obligatory visas for Turkish citizens, and other EEC countries followed suit.¹¹³ The West German government under Chancellor Helmut Schmidt found itself in a particularly tricky situation and had to tread lightly. For West Germany, many issues were at stake: Turkey was a crucial NATO ally against the Soviet Union, West Germany was the second largest provider of military and economic aid to Turkey, and Turkey’s cooperation on the question of guest workers’ return migration was paramount.¹¹⁴ Moreover, the coup government’s heightened emphasis on Turkish nationalism and militarism contradicted West Germans’ growing wariness of nationalism and their turn toward a “postnational” identity rooted in broader ties to Europe. But Schmidt’s government also had to balance its diplomatic support for Turkey with domestic criticism. SPD parliamentarians expressed concerns that Turkey might “abuse” West German military aid to “suppress” the Kurdish minority and Turkish dissidents. In solidarity with Turkish and Kurdish activists, West German students, journalists, churches, trade unions, and migrant advocacy organizations complained that the West German government was “dismissing” or “watering down” Turkey’s abuses.¹¹⁵ Still, even the mild reproach of Turkey by Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher “clearly offended the Turkish leaders.”¹¹⁶

The 1980 military coup alarmed West German policymakers not only because of the authoritarian government and blatant human rights violations, but also because the resulting rise in asylum seekers posed a further impediment to solving the domestic “Turkish problem.” They argued that granting asylum to Turkish citizens would not only result in far greater numbers of “Islamic,” “Asiatic,” and “Oriental” people coming to West German, but would also create a “Kurdish minority problem” by transferring Turkey’s “ethnic tensions” to West Germany.¹¹⁷ As a result, West Germany continued to label Turkey a “safe country,” excluded Kurds and Yazidis from its narrow definition of “political persecution,” and accepted only 2 percent of asylum seekers from Turkey between January 1979 and August 1983.¹¹⁸ Policymakers also feared that granting asylum to dissidents would heighten political violence among migrants. Particularly worrisome were the Grey Wolves (Bozkurtlar), a militant, right-wing extremist, pan-Turkist organization tied to Turkey’s Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) founded in 1969. In the words of Der Spiegel, the MHP was “racist” and “fascist,” and its founder Alparslan Türkeş was a “Hitler admirer” who “dreams of a new Greater Turkish Empire.”¹¹⁹ The West German Interior Ministry did not hesitate to describe Türkeş’s “true goals” in terms of Nazism: seizing power “exactly as the Nazis,” implementing “National Socialist doctrine” in Turkey through “oppressive measures,” “liquidating” all ethnic minorities, and uniting all Turks on the Earth under the principle of ‘One People, One Empire’ (ein Volk, ein Reich).”¹²⁰ Although Turkey’s post-coup government outlawed the MHP and imprisoned Türkeş, many West Germans continued to associate the Grey Wolves with Turkish authoritarianism and worried that extremism lurked among guest workers.

The situation was further compounded by Turkey’s looming full membership in the EEC, which was planned for 1986 but never materialized. Just three days after the coup, the EEC declared that discussions about Turkey’s full membership could only continue if the military government “quickly reinstated democratic institutions and respected human rights.”¹²¹ Yet it soon became clear that Turkey was failing to “announce a precise timeline” for returning to democracy and that discussions about full membership would therefore be “frozen.”¹²² With the highest proportion of Turkish immigrants, West Germany had the largest stake in Turkey’s membership – particularly regarding the provision that citizens of member states be granted freedom of mobility. Already grappling with how to limit the number of Turks allowed to enter the country, West German officials desperately sought to twist the terms of the EEC’s discussions such that Turkey could become a member without receiving freedom of mobility. As one internal memorandum on the issue stated emphatically, underlined for emphasis, “We must permanently exclude Turks from having unlimited access to our labor market!”¹²³ Behind closed doors, the Belgian and Danish governments, which also had sizable Turkish populations, agreed. West Germans thus weaponized Turkey’s authoritarianism and human rights violations to express their concerns about freedom of mobility for unwanted Turkish citizens.

West Germans’ general reproach of Turkey’s military coup, alongside their rising racism against migrants, incensed Turks in the home country. To expose West Germans’ hypocrisy, Turkish critics often used the language of human rights against them. In an especially frustrating blow, some of the most vocal criticism of the nexus between racism and return migration came from the post-coup dictator, General Kenan Evren. Unequivocally guilty of perpetrating human rights violations himself, Evren invoked the language of human rights not only to portray himself as the custodian of the migrants abroad but also to deflect Europeans’ criticism of him. Reflecting the Turkish government’s financially based opposition to guest workers’ return migration, Evren centered his criticism on the ongoing discussions of a remigration law. In his New Year’s speech in 1982, Evren proclaimed: “We are following with horror and dismay how the very same countries that previously called for cheap laborers in order to drive their own economic progress are now attempting to expel the country’s same workers in defiance of their human rights. Our government opposes this injustice with full force.”¹²⁴ Four months later, Evren pledged to do everything in his power to prevent West Germany from sending guest worker families back but noted that he would try to make life pleasant for families who returned.¹²⁵

The battle over human rights played out primarily in the Turkish press. Although Turkey’s 1961 constitution had enshrined freedom of the press as a fundamental right, the leaders of the 1980 military coup banned several communist newspapers and arrested hundreds of journalists and editors. The country’s oldest and most reputable newspaper, Cumhuriyet, was even closed for ten days after a critical editorial.¹²⁶ To avoid problems, mainstream newspapers generally exercised self-censorship and avoided harsh criticism of the government, whereas those on the right side of the political spectrum often functioned as government mouthpieces. Despite their persuasions, journalists eagerly criticized West German racism and leapt to the migrants’ defense. Some were attuned to the nuances of the West German debate over terminology. In an article about the December 1981 survey that classified 49 percent of West Germans as “ausländerfeindlich,” Cumhuriyet explained that West Germans deliberately used the word Ausländerfeindlichkeit (yabancı düşmanlığı) to distinguish it from biological racism or “blood-based hatred” (kan düşmanlığı).¹²⁷ The most inflammatory editorials often invoked the Turkish term for “racism” (ırkçılık), especially when comparing the migrants’ situation to the Nazis’ persecution of Jews.

The rhetoric in Turkish articles, particularly in editorials and columns, was often virulent. Several portrayed West Germany as a new enemy who was destroying the otherwise “friendly” history of Prussian-Ottoman and German-Turkish international affairs. The notion of “friendliness” recalled their close economic and diplomatic ties since the nineteenth century, the German-Ottoman military alliance during World War I, Turkey’s neutrality in World War II despite the atrocities of Nazism, their ongoing NATO alliance during the Cold War, and the signing of the guest worker recruitment treaty itself. Emblematic of this rhetoric of broken friendship, in January 1981, Milliyet insisted that it made no sense to continue “wearing the guise of friendship and brotherhood” given that West Germans wanted the migrants to leave.¹²⁸ While an official at the West German Consulate in Istanbul dismissed this article as a “rarity” with limited public resonance, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt made a point of mentioning that Turkey remained a “good friend” in a Milliyet interview several months later.¹²⁹ Tropes of destroyed friendship continued to increase, however, as all three major West German parties hardened their stance on migration policy. “It is sad,” wrote Hürriyet several months later, “that the old friendship between our countries, which outlasted the defeat of the First World War, the troubled Weimar period, and even the Hitler dictatorship, is now being destroyed by a Germany that calls itself democratic.”¹³⁰ The concluding phrase, “a Germany that calls itself democratic,” burns with sarcasm. Its implication, reiterated in numerous other Turkish newspaper articles of the time, was that West Germany had no claim to moral superiority in matters of democracy, human rights, and freedom.

In scathing editorials, Turkish journalists insinuated that the West German government’s various restrictions on Turkish migrants constituted an act of ethnic discrimination that was more discordant with democracy and human rights than their own country’s military coup. The Turkish newspaper Son Havadis denounced Schmidt’s proposal to restrict the age of family reunification as a “violation of all humanitarian principles,” and Milliyet called the proposed new visa requirement for Turkish tourists a matter of “international solidarity and human rights” that “built a Berlin Wall against the Turkish workers.”¹³¹ Günaydın denounced a controversial Baden-Württemberg law that forbade the marriage of any workers who resided in an apartment smaller than thirty square meters as a restriction on the Turks’ “human rights” and, in another article, decried the treatment of Turks in general: “The Germans themselves constitute the first class, Christian guest workers the second class, and Turkish guest workers are the third class.”¹³²

Turkish commentators also supported their claims with generalizations and stereotypes about Germans’ personalities and worldviews in the aftermath of Nazism. In 1981, the humorist Aziz Nesin penned a series of scathing articles attributing West Germans’ “oppression” of Turkish migrants to their national degradation after their defeat in World War II – a means of re-exerting their power by targeting an internal minority population.¹³³ Nesin further argued that Germans’ hatred of foreigners was the consequence of their post-fascist malaise. Psychologically combatting the excesses of Nazism, both East and West Germans were staid, bland, and humorless, preferring “food without taste, flowers without fragrance, streets without children.” German train stations were overrun with prostitutes, and Germans were so obsessed with money that they opted to remain in unhappy marriages rather than get divorced and relinquish their tax breaks. Although Germans appeared to derive joy from their pet dogs, Nesin reminded his readers that the Nazis, too, had loved dogs – not because they loved animals, but because they hated humans.

Defying West Germans’ efforts to combat their Nazi past, Turkish journalists repeatedly framed anti-Turkish racism as a continuity of Nazism and drew overt parallels to the persecution of Jews during the Third Reich. Günaydın printed photographs of graffiti that stated “Turks out!” and “We don’t sell to Turks!” alongside the iconic 1933 photograph of Nazi stormtroopers holding the antisemitic sign, “Germans! Protect yourselves! Do not buy from Jews!”¹³⁴ Demanding that the Turkish government protect its citizens abroad, the newspaper threatened: “Those who want to relive the spirit of Nazism should know that we live in another time. We won’t remain passive. We are in the position to cause great difficulties.”¹³⁵ Tercüman expressed a similar sentiment: “Even though the 1920s and 1930s are not repeating themselves,” Turkish migrants in Europe needed to establish lobbies and pressure groups to prevent the situation from escalating.¹³⁶

For the West German Foreign Office, the Turkish press’s most frustrating comparisons were between Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and Adolf Hitler. A 1981 front-page article in Milliyet, headlined “From Hitler to Schmidt,” contended that the Social Democrats’ discussions of restricting the family reunification policy “do not surprise us.”¹³⁷ In their “desire that all non-German races be crushed,” the Nazis, too, had “separated women from their children, husbands from their wives.” The article concluded: “Perhaps one thinks that Nazism is dead in Germany because there is no more Adolf Hitler in the beer halls of Munich. But the situation has not changed. Hitler is dead, but now we have Helmut Schmidt.” The comparison remained a sore spot between the two countries. In 1983, when Turkish officials demanded that West Germany deport regime opponents, one West German official retorted that they had not even deported Turkish citizens who had written news articles defaming the former chancellor as “Adolf Schmidt.”¹³⁸

The Turkish media’s comparisons to Hitler and Nazism made their way back to German citizens in mainstream media reports. The Rheinische Post reported that the “Turkish public follows anti-foreigner activities in the Federal Republic with great attention…. Every right-radical graffiti in German cities is sensationalized as an attack. The Turks in the Federal Republic are compared more and more with the Jews in the time of National Socialism. Chancellor Schmidt was placed in the same political tradition as Adolf Hitler.”¹³⁹ West German newspapers even referenced specific Turkish news articles, such as Yankı’s recounting the story of a German woman who faced condemnation simply for having married a Turk. While acquiring a visa for her husband at the consulate in Istanbul, an immigration officer had berated her choice of spouse. “All Turks are pigs,” he reportedly said. “Is it your responsibility to help them? Shame on you as a German.”¹⁴⁰

For the West German Ambassador to Turkey, Dirk Oncken, who served during the tumultuous period of 1979 to 1984, the Turkish press’s allegations of West German racism were both a daily annoyance and a matter of great diplomatic concern.¹⁴¹ Oncken dismissed the most inflammatory articles as propagandistic “smear campaigns” (Hetzkampagne) grounded in “emotion” rather than “rationality” and reflective of Turks’ innate “lust for conflict” and “mania for creating foreign scapegoats.”¹⁴² Still, he rushed to the defense of West Germany’s reputation in a series of interviews with Turkish journalists. In a March 1982 interview with Anadolu Ajansi, he insisted that “signs of Ausländerfeindlichkeit” were “isolated cases” and that the notorious Heidelberg Manifesto was “a private opinion that reflects the opinions of neither the federal government nor the majority of the German population.”¹⁴³ In September, he toughened his stance, denying the existence of Ausländerfeindlichkeit altogether. All forms of intolerance were “repugnant,” Oncken maintained. “But in which countries do such sentiments not exist?”¹⁴⁴ Yet Oncken’s efforts to downplay West German Ausländerfeindlichkeit by portraying it as a universal phenomenon proved a poor diplomatic strategy. In a combative article, which explicitly cited Semra Ertan’s suicide as an example of the pervasiveness of West German racism, Yankı questioned: “Is the German ambassador telling the truth?”¹⁴⁵

The media’s skepticism toward Oncken’s optimistic portrayal trickled down to their target readership, the Turkish population within Turkey, who sent hate mail to the embassy. One man, İlhan Düzgit, accused Oncken of pretending to be friendly to the Turks: “If you think that the Turks are so dumb that they believe you, then you are crazy.”¹⁴⁶ The writers of the hate mail echoed the media’s criticisms by arguing that West Germans’ mistreatment of the migrants had destroyed the historical friendship between the two countries. It was “a shame,” Düzgit further lamented, “that our longstanding friendship has come to an end, and that you have lost a real friend … The Germans today are only foreign and even enemies for us.”¹⁴⁷ As another of Oncken’s critics put it, “It was the Turks’ own fault” that “we trusted you” as allies in World War I and that “we had mercy for you and did not backstab you like the others.” In short, “We have begun to hate you.”¹⁴⁸

Because they had not migrated to West Germany themselves, the writers of the hate mail based their impressions on horror stories they heard from friends and relatives living abroad and on their own experiences navigating West Germany’s immigration bureaucracy from afar. Ahmet Kanun told Oncken that he had collected enough stories about racist incidents to “write a novel” and that Germans mistreated the migrants not only in the immigration office, but also in mundane settings like the butcher shop, the beach, and the movie theater.¹⁴⁹ Kanun also complained about West Germans’ restrictions on entry visas for Turkish citizens: “Because I have no personal apartment, no car, no fat bank account, I can’t visit my aunt who lives in Germany … My request for a visa was denied, as if I were an anarchist or a suspicious person.”¹⁵⁰ Another writer had heard nightmarish tales about West Germany’s perceived religious impiety, which he used to contradict the notion that Turks were unable or unwilling to integrate: “To which of your buffoonery should we assimilate? To your Fasching? Or to the shameless way that you celebrate the birth of your prophet at the end of the year? Instead of praying!”¹⁵¹

The hate mail that observers in the home country sent both to Oncken and to West German President Karl Carstens also reflects the tendency among observers in the home country to whitewash Turkey’s own human rights violations by construing West German racism as a foil against which to tout Turkish nationalist narratives. Writing to Oncken, Kanun made the comparison directly. “Because of his psychological master-race complex,” he explained, “every German between seven and seventy years old is an Ausländerfeind.”¹⁵² Whereas racism had “invaded the blood of Germans” and was embedded in “German culture” itself, “the concept of a ‘master race,’” is “unheard of” in the “character” of Turks, who had always granted minorities the utmost “tolerance” and “rights.” Several guest workers writing to Carstens also pursued this strategy. Kenan Cengiz, for one, argued that West Germans had no right to criticize Turkey’s military coup because their abuse of Turkish migrants was “worse” than the “pain inflicted on the Jews in 1945.” Espousing a right-wing nationalist narrative, he defended the 1980 coup as an intervention to protect the “human rights” of the Turkish population, rejected the accusation that Turks had ever committed “inhumane torture,” and portrayed West German sympathy for Kurds as a veiled attempt to sow division among guest workers.¹⁵³ Another man, Feyaz Aksungar, professed his love of Germany in general but told Carstens that West Germans’ racism and criticism of the coup “breaks Turks’ hearts.” He further insisted that the coup’s dictator, Evren, had improved the Turkish economy and was making progress toward restoring democracy.¹⁵⁴

Taken together, the myriad political speeches, newspaper articles, and hate letters make a much deeper point about the entangled history of Turks and Germans, reshaping and expanding our understanding of their transnational relationship. On the one hand, these rich sources introduce the early 1980s as the precise moment when the two countries’ historical “friendship” gradually transformed into “enmity,” or at least lurched catastrophically off balance. This transformation was fueled by multiple overlapping factors, both domestic and international: Turkey’s 1980 military coup and authoritarian turn, West Germany’s drafting of the 1983 remigration law despite the Turkish government’s opposition to return migration, the home country’s concern for the rising racism against migrants, West Germany’s opposition to accepting asylum seekers from Turkey, and West Germany’s hesitation to grant freedom of mobility to Turks despite Turkey’s planned EEC accession in 1986. In short, the issue of migration was not peripheral to the grander narrative of Turkish-German geopolitics but rather central to it. And Turkey’s 1980 military coup was not relegated to Turkey’s domestic history but rather reverberated across borders, reshaping both international affairs and migration policy.

Turkish observers’ pervasive rhetoric of broken “friendship” further testifies to both countries’ selective memory, and to their abuses and whitewashing of history. Their historical friendship was undeniably tainted by the two countries’ collaboration in violence, human rights violations, and genocides throughout the early twentieth century. As allies during World War I, Prussians had defended the Ottomans’ violent suppression of minority groups, even going as far as defending the 1915–1916 Armenian Genocide. As Stefan Ihrig has shown, many Prussian officials justified the extermination of the Armenians on the basis that they posed not only an internal security threat to their Ottoman ally, but also because they represented a “racial problem” as the “Jews of the Orient.”¹⁵⁵ The two countries’ “friendship” was also rooted in the exchange of transnational eugenic ideologies: many Turkish scientists admired Nazi Germany’s “racial hygiene” policies and authoritarian regime as a model for achieving a state-mandated improvement of Turkey’s genetic stock through promoting reproduction, preventing sexual “race-mixing,” and eliminating hereditarily “inferior” people.¹⁵⁶ And, despite being aware of the Nazis’ persecution of Jews, the Turkish government chose to maintain friendly diplomatic relations with Hitler’s regime until it switched to the Allies’ side in February 1945 – once it was clear that the Nazis would lose.

Even more damning is Turkey’s collaboration in the Holocaust. To this day, Turkey denies its culpability in Nazi atrocities, insisting that it saved Jews and welcomed them with open arms.¹⁵⁷ However, as Corry Guttstadt has shown, Turkey persecuted far more Jews than it saved.¹⁵⁸ Many Turkish officials and diplomats were outspoken Nazi sympathizers and supported fascism as a political model. From 1933 to 1945, Turkey persecuted the 75,000 Jews within its borders, alongside other non-Muslim minorities, through high tax rates, dispossession of property, and forced labor. Turkey accepted only about 600 Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in the 1930s, mostly elite intellectuals; instead, international Jewish organizations and Istanbul’s local Jewish community bypassed restrictions to save additional Jews illegally. Although 13,000 European Jews passed through Turkey to Palestine in the early 1940s, the Turkish government generally strove to block this transit route. Turkey also withdrew citizenship from several thousand ethnically Turkish Jews living in Nazi-occupied territories, which deprived them of protections like the right to enter Turkey, and it repatriated only 114 of the 3,000 Jews that the Nazis deemed eligible in early 1945. Overall, the Nazis deported approximately 3,000 Jews of Turkish origin to extermination and concentration camps – and Turkey was complicit.

Paradoxically, then, the rhetoric with which Turks assailed West Germans’ racism and the proposed return migration law in the early 1980s reveals more similarities than differences between the two countries: on both sides, the denial and deflection of both past and present racism, human rights violations, and genocide reigned supreme. When West Germans criticized Turkey’s 1980 military coup, Turks in the home country fought back by accusing West Germans of treating Turks like Jews and promoting a resurgence of the Third Reich. West Germans, in turn, used the language of “genocide” to express existential fears that migrants were biologically exterminating the German Volk. At the same time, Turkish observers failed – and refused – to recognize their own abuses, from the Armenian Genocide to the military dictatorship’s human rights violations against Kurds, political leftists, and other internal minorities. Instead, by deflecting sole blame for genocide and human rights violations onto Germans, and by espousing right-wing nationalist narratives, Turks in the home country attempted to absolve themselves of guilt. While they defended the migrants against racism, they also used them as pawns in a battle over the politics of history and memory. As both countries grappled with the question of guest workers’ return migration in the early 1980s, silencing the past became an urgent political goal.

*****

West Germany’s racial reckoning and the debates surrounding a remigration law extended far beyond its borders. From policymakers to self-proclaimed “ordinary” citizens, many of the same Germans who rejected the racist rallying cry “Turks out!” were unwilling to acknowledge their own complicity in perpetuating racism. Through denial and deflection, they changed the terms of the discussion: concerns about Turks constituted Ausländerfeindlichkeit, not Rassismus, and Turks posed a particular threat because of “cultural difference,” not biology. For some, there was even no such thing as Ausländerfeindlichkeit – and if it did exist, then it was a phenomenon relegated to fringe radical neo-Nazis. But just like in matters of national identity, West Germans did not have a singular claim to defining whether they were racist, what counted as racism, what to call racism, and whether anti-Turkish racism marked a continuity with Nazism. And as in earlier discussions about bilateral development aid for promoting return migration, Turkey’s government, media, and population all exerted power and agency by intervening into these debates from afar. Likewise, the migrants themselves fought back as well. Invoking the language of human rights, they made their views clear: West Germany had not fully reckoned with Nazism, and Hitler’s shadow continued to loom.

It is worth returning here to the legacy and memory of Semra Ertan, the young Turkish-German activist whose suicide in 1982 provided a powerful emotional anchor to these debates. Six months after her death, Turkish newspapers reported that a young man replicated her protest by setting himself on fire in the very same Hamburg marketplace.¹⁵⁹ In 1990, West German novelist Sten Nadolny honored Ertan’s memory in a fictional character named Ayse, who leaps off a rooftop in protest of racism, sparking German and Turkish officials to debate the cause of her suicide.¹⁶⁰ And Ertan’s most prominent poem, “Benim Adım Yabancı” (My Name is Foreigner), later became a mainstay in public school curricula in Turkey, introducing Turkish students to the historical struggles of the diaspora in Germany. In this sense, her death was not in vain but rather has lived on in both countries’ memory for decades.

But the overall memory of anti-racist struggles in Germany, and of Ertan’s suicide, is also riddled with a major problem: it has, in many respects, been coopted and overshadowed by Germans. One of the most prominent references to Ertan, for example, came in 1985, when the West German journalist Günter Wallraff dedicated his famous book Ganz unten (Lowest of the Low) to her, as well as to Cemal Kemal Altun, a twenty-three-year-old asylum seeker who had recently killed himself in fear of being deported back to Turkey.¹⁶¹ A powerful undercover exposé of anti-Turkish racism, Wallraff’s book recounted the two years he spent assuming the identity of a Turkish man named Ali Siniroğlu – disguising himself with blackface, brown contact lenses, a dark-haired wig, a mustache, and a stereotypical Turkish accent – and working in various unskilled jobs, including at the Thyssen steel factor in Duisburg. Within two years, the book sold nearly three million copies and was translated into fourteen languages, garnering international sympathy for Turkish migrants.¹⁶² Crucially, however, Ali Siniroğlu, the man who had lent Wallraff his identity documents, called the author “two-faced” for unevenly splitting his colossal royalties and abandoning the many Turkish migrants who had helped him with his investigation.¹⁶³ Overall, it is striking that today far more Germans know the name Günter Wallraff than Semra Ertan.¹⁶⁴

Even among those who have brought – and are continuing to bring – serious attention to Semra Ertan’s activism, a crucial part of her message is sometimes forgotten: she sought to direct attention not only to racism in West Germany but also to the discrimination she felt when she returned to Turkey. In her poem “My Name is Foreigner,” she lamented: “My country sold us to Germany, like stepchildren, like useless people. But it still needs remittances.”¹⁶⁵ In another, she questioned: “Where do I belong? In Turkey, or am I a foreigner? … In my homeland, they look at us differently after years of living far away. Everything is foreign to us.”¹⁶⁶ Ertan’s observations force us to reexamine the Turkish rhetoric surrounding West German racism and the proposed remigration law. Despite their sympathy, the Turkish media and population engaged in their own criticism of the migrants, treating them as “Germanized” Almancı who were no longer fully Turkish.

Despite all these transnational concerns about racism, the passing of the remigration law came closer and closer to becoming a reality. In July 1982, after months of publicly opposing the CDU/CSU’s desire to pass the remigration law, the SPD government under Helmut Schmidt introduced its own version of a “Foreigner Consolidation Law” (Ausländerkonsolidierungsgesetz), which for the first time expressed the party’s commitment to promoting return migration through domestic policy.¹⁶⁷ The proposed law included another controversial provision – further reducing the age limit for family reunification to just six years old – which Interior Minister Gerhart Baum and Foreigner Commissioner Liselotte Funcke opposed on the grounds of “humanity” and “morality.”¹⁶⁸ But Schmidt’s government never passed its consolidation law, since the SPD’s thirteen-year control over the parliament ended in October 1982. After a vote of no confidence, the FDP entered a coalition with the CDU/CSU as the dominant partner, and Helmut Kohl replaced Schmidt as chancellor. Under the new Christian Democratic majority government, the stage was set for passing a morally controversial law that promoted return migration in the service of racism.

5 The Mass Exodus

When CDU leader Helmut Kohl was sworn in as West Germany’s new chancellor on October 4, 1982, he resolved to fulfill his party’s promise of turning a remigration law into reality. Even though Schmidt and the Social Democrats had begun developing their own version of a remigration law several months before, Kohl’s goal was far more extreme. In a secret meeting with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher just three weeks after taking office, Kohl expressed his desire to “reduce the number of Turks in Germany by 50 percent.” Due to the public outrage surrounding racism, however, “he could not say that publicly yet.”¹

For both guest workers and Turks in the home country, the change in government proved ominous. Continuing the tradition of likening German chancellors to Hitler, the tabloid Bulvar printed a cartoon depicting Kohl with swastikas on his glasses.² The guest workers, wrote Güneş, were especially “worried” about Kohl.³ As Milliyet columnist Örsan Öymen explained, “Whereas the old government wanted to freeze the number of guest workers, the new government wants to send them home.”⁴ Milliyet further urged the Turkish government to “intervene to protect the rights of guest workers.”⁵ Columnist Rauf Tamer suggested that his fellow citizens initiate a form of “collective resistance”: “If the Turkish workers are forced to leave Germany, we must boycott German goods and stop flying with Lufthansa,” because “money is the only thing that interests [Germans].”⁶

Given such criticism both domestically and abroad, Kohl and his CDU/CSU-FDP coalition knew that getting rid of half of the Turkish migrant population would be no easy feat. In crafting the remigration law, they grappled with a political and ethical dilemma: How, after perpetrating the Holocaust forty years prior, could they kick out the Turks without compromising their post-fascist values of liberalism and democracy? How, amid Germany’s Cold War division, could they skirt the issue of human rights violations while still upholding their international status as an ally of the Free World? How could they defend their domestic claim to being the true heir to pre-1933 German liberalism and the presumptive future leaders of a one-day reunified German nation? And how could they do so in a way that maximized their appearance of generosity and minimized criticism from the Turkish government? Surely, they knew that they could not forcibly deport half of the Turkish migrant population.

Their answer, ultimately codified in the Law for the Promotion of the Voluntary Return of Foreigners (Rückkehrförderungsgesetz) of November 28, 1983, was to pay Turks to leave. Under the guise of generosity, the West German government offered unemployed former guest workers a “remigration premium” (Rückkehrprämie) of 10,500 DM (approximately 20,000 USD today) to pack their bags, take their spouses and children, and leave the country. But there was a catch: even though taking the money was voluntary, they had to exit West German borders by a strict deadline: September 30, 1984. Tired of waiting for guest workers as they wavered on the difficult question of staying or leaving, West German policymakers wanted to force guest worker families to decide, within just ten months, whether they were willing to permanently abandon their jobs, schools, lives, and residence permits – with no option to return.

While the remigration law did not fulfill Kohl’s extreme 50 percent goal, it did spark one of the largest mass remigrations in modern European history. Between November 1983 and September 1984, within just ten months, 15 percent of the Turkish migrant population – 250,000 men, women, and children – returned to Turkey (Figure 5.1). For some, the decision to leave was easy. Having been on the fence about returning, the financial incentive was enticing. With the money, they believed they could finally return to their homeland, start their own small businesses, retire comfortably, and no longer face uncertainty. For others, the decision was difficult. Decrying the 10,500 DM as a mere pittance, they criticized the West German government’s initial refusal to pay out their social security contributions in full. But they also wanted to escape the racist climate of West Germany, which had only worsened in recent years, and to prevent their children’s further “Germanization” by bringing them back to Turkey. With many children having spent time in Turkey only on their vacations, parents’ decision to leave sometimes tore families apart.

Figure 5.1 Annual percentage of West Germany’s Turkish migrant population who returned “permanently,” 1980–1990.⁷ In 1984, due to the West German government’s remigration law, the rate of return migration skyrocketed to 15 percent. It then declined sharply to just over 2 percent throughout the decade’s latter half. Created by author.

Once they returned to Turkey, their dreams often turned into nightmares. Nearly half the guest workers who returned to Turkey with the 1983 remigration law came to regret their decisions, as they encountered parallel difficulties “reintegrating” into their own homeland. For some, the happy homecoming turned sour, as years of seeing their friends, family, and neighbors only on their vacations left them ostracized as “Germanized” and culturally estranged. Others went bankrupt after failed business ventures, having underestimated Turkey’s dire economic situation and hyperinflation. But failure also came at a psychological cost – forcing guest workers and their families to question whether all the years of separation had truly been worth it. The mass exodus became a cautionary tale that discouraged other guest workers from remigrating in later years, leading to a stark decline in return migration throughout the 1980s.

Paying Turks to Leave

To solve the “Turkish problem,” the West German government paid them to leave. With the 1983 Law for the Promotion of the Voluntary Return of Foreigners, the federal government offered money directly to unemployed guest workers in the form of a “return premium,” more euphemistically described as “remigration assistance” (Rückkehrhilfe): a one-time cash transfer of 10,500 DM, plus an additional 1,500 DM per underage child. To receive the money, the worker’s entire family, including his or her spouse and underage children, would need to exit West German borders. Once a guest worker had taken the money, he or she could return to the country only as a tourist. Even children who had been born in West Germany or had spent most of their lives there would require an entrance visa. Upon their departure, a border official would stamp all family members’ residence permits “invalid,” marking their official severance from a country where many had lived for nearly two decades.

The basic concept behind this remigration law was actually developed many years before Kohl assumed the chancellorship. In 1975, the state government of Baden-Württemberg began lobbying for the development of a federal plan to “relieve the labor market” through “a significant reduction of excessive guest worker employment.” The mechanism would be the provision of “return assistance” (Rückkehrhilfe) financed by the Federal Labor Office (Bundesanstalt für Arbeit). Proponents within the Baden-Württemberg government lauded the success of a “spectacular” model case among workers at the Audi factory in the area surrounding Heilbronn and Neckarsulm. Within only fourteen days in May 1975, an offer of 8,000 DM severance paid by the state of Baden-Württemberg had convinced nearly 2,000 guest workers to return to their home country.⁸ “In contrast to many initially skeptical voices,” Baden-Württemberg Minister President Hans Filbinger declared, the program “demonstrated that a large number of guest workers are ready to take advantage of such an offer.” According to the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, Filbinger’s proposal found a “wide echo” in the public and piqued the interest of other state minister presidents.⁹ But it also drew criticism. The metalworkers’ trade union IG Metall wrote, “For the trade unions, the foreign workers are not a maneuverable mass that can be hired and gotten rid of as one pleases, even under today’s increasingly difficult circumstances.”¹⁰

There was also international precedent for paying foreign workers to leave. France was a frequent point of comparison.¹¹ At the time, France was experiencing an economic downturn similar to that in West Germany, complete with mass layoffs in the iron industry. French statistics in 1977 reported the presence of over 100,000 unemployed foreigners who had registered for unemployment assistance at the Labor Office.¹² While over 10 percent were citizens of countries that enjoyed freedom of movement throughout France (including 8,611 Italians), the remainder came from countries outside the EEC, including Algeria, Morocco, Portugal, Spain, Tunisia, Yugoslavia, and what French media lumped together as “Black Africa.” Hoping to rid itself particularly of non-European, non-white, and non-Christian postcolonial migrants from North and Sub-Saharan Africa, the French government offered unemployed foreign laborers 10,000 Francs (approximately 4,300 DM), as well as an additional 10,000 per unemployed spouse and 5,000 per child. Informational materials distributed in local labor and immigration offices were enticing: “Because you have worked in France, you have the same rights as French workers. But would you not perhaps prefer, if you had the means, to return to your homeland and to settle there again?”¹³ By 1981, however, the French law had proven a failure. Not only had it drawn criticism, but only 87,500 workers had taken the remigration premium, most from Spain and Portugal rather than North and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Likewise, inspiration came from concurrent efforts to pay asylum seekers to leave. In 1979, the West German federal and state governments established the Reintegration and Emigration Program for Asylum Seekers in Germany (REAG).¹⁴ The program, implemented by the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration, offered asylum seekers 930 DM to permanently leave West Germany and either return to their home country or migrate onward to a third country. By 1982, over 9,000 asylum seekers had taken this premium, costing the government an average of two million DM annually. Although billed as a “humanitarian assistance program” that would “correct” asylum seekers’ “failed expectations,” the REAG program had ulterior motives – namely of saving West Germany money in the long run and solving the asylum question with fewer controversial deportations.¹⁵ Throughout the 1980s, Belgium, Switzerland, and the Netherlands followed West Germany’s lead.¹⁶

But convincing Turkish guest workers to go home was a more complex task. Having earned Deutschmarks in West Germany for up to two decades, and well aware of the disastrous economic situation in their home country, Turks had long deferred their dream of return migration (Figure 5.2). Although government surveys revealed that 75 percent of guest workers had a “latent” desire to return home, the number of Turks who actually did so had decreased by half, from 148,000 in 1975 to 70,000 in 1980.¹⁷ A 1982 survey of Turkish guest workers living in Nuremberg revealed a variety of conditions under which Turkish workers would return to their home country. These ranged from general improvements in living conditions in Turkey (“when the living standard in Turkey is exactly as it is in Germany”) to specific material concerns (“when I have a car, television, washing machine, record player, video machine, dishwasher, a large refrigerator, electrical kitchen appliances, and money”). Some less commonly listed conditions, though probably offered in jest, were “when war breaks out in the Federal Republic,” “when I win the lottery,” and “when the Germans kick me out.”¹⁹ Another 1982 survey of 312 workers in Saarland and Rhineland-Palatinate revealed that 50 percent feared that they would not be able to find a job in Turkey, would not be able to work independently in Turkey, and would earn less in Turkey than in Germany.²⁰

Figure 5.2 Cartoon depicting Turkish guest workers’ difficult decision regarding remigration, 1979. Should they return to their homeland, or should they remain in West Germany and continue to save Deutschmarks?.¹⁸

© Cumhuriyet, used with permission

Given that guest workers’ reasons for staying were primarily economic, policymakers knew that the meager 930 DM they were offering to asylum seekers would not fit the bill. After much calculation, they settled on offering unemployed guest workers 10,500 DM plus 1,500 DM per underage child. This number corresponded to the government benefits that a typical guest worker received during seven months without a job, including unemployment pay, health insurance, social security contributions, and child allowances.²¹ Despite the upfront cost, West German policymakers anticipated far more substantial long-term savings. For every unemployed guest worker who left, the government anticipated saving up to 10,000 DM per year in social welfare spending – even after paying out the one-time 10,500 DM premium.²² As one Foreign Office memorandum concluded optimistically, “These measures are already cost-neutral in the mid-term (3–4 years) and then – because of the decline in entitlements – even yield saving effects.”²³ Critics, however, were skeptical of the cost savings. SPD politician Rudolf Dreßler condemned the draft law as “nonsense,” arguing that it constituted “nothing more than hidden state debt” and would “throw money out the window.”²⁴

The government also carefully deliberated which guest worker nationalities would be eligible for the remigration premium. Although the primary interest was in reducing the Turkish population, policymakers knew that they would endure both domestic and international scorn – certainly from the Turkish government – if the law singled out Turkish citizens. In an October 1982 memorandum issued two weeks after Kohl became chancellor, tellingly titled “Turkey Policy,” one bureaucrat warned against portraying the law as “exclusively oriented toward the Turkish workers … although we are internally conceptualizing this policy with regard to this group.”²⁵ But they also wanted to avoid making the category too broad since they feared that guest workers from Italy and Greece, who, as citizens of EEC member states, enjoyed freedom of mobility, might abuse the law by taking the 10,500 DM, exiting West German borders briefly, and quickly returning.²⁶ Ultimately, they offered the premium only to unemployed guest workers from non-EEC countries who were not married to a West German citizen. Besides Turkey, the eligible countries were Spain, Portugal, Yugoslavia, Morocco, Tunisia, and South Korea.²⁷

German policymakers debated several other provisions. One was the “return option” (Wiederkehroption) – the question of whether guest workers who took the 10,500 DM premium would be allowed to return to West Germany. When first conceptualizing the law in the summer of 1982, the Social Democratic government proposed allowing guest workers to return to West Germany within six months of their departure. This option aimed to assuage guest workers’ concerns about their home countries’ unstable economic situations: “As long as a foreign worker cannot be sure that he can actually invest his capital in his homeland or that there is actually a job for him there, then he will not be willing to leave the FRG forever.”²⁸ To avoid exploitation, the premium would only be paid out if a guest worker stayed in Turkey beyond the six months. But the version of the law passed under Kohl’s government nixed the return option. To ensure that guest workers and their family members would leave the country permanently, West German border officials would stamp their residence permits “invalid.” The Interior Senator of West Berlin proposed an even harsher measure, not included in the final version of the law, which would have prevented Turks from returning even as tourists for at least several years.²⁹

Even more controversial was the question of whether – and if so, then when – returning guest workers could receive their social security contributions. This problem lay largely in the difference between the Turkish and West German retirement ages. While West Germany paid social security benefits only after age sixty-five, individuals in Turkey typically retired at forty-five or fifty.³⁰ This discrepancy meant that middle-aged guest workers who planned to fulfill their dream of retiring in Turkey might need to wait over a decade before receiving their West German social security payouts. Although a previous policy permitted guest workers to receive their employee social security contributions early after a two-year waiting period, the draft laws under both the SPD and CDU governments offered an immediate payout. But there was a huge catch: they would lose their employer social security contributions entirely.³¹ In criticizing the law, the Citizens Initiative of Foreign Workers in Hanover tabulated the potential lost wages in the hypothetical scenario of a guest worker who had worked in West Germany for eleven years and retired at age sixty-three.³² Assuming that the worker had contributed 23,000 DM overall to social security, he would receive 100,000 DM by age seventy-five if he stayed in Germany. But if he returned to Turkey, he would only receive his 23,000 DM employee contribution, and the extra 67,000 DM in employer contributions would remain in the government’s social security fund. Though devastating to the migrants, this provision was a welcome boon to the federal budget.

After devising the remigration law, the next challenge was how to sell it. Given ongoing debates about racism and the longstanding critique of the general idea of a remigration law, proponents portrayed it in a way that sought to reconcile the morally controversial policy with their post-Holocaust commitment to upholding the rights of minority populations. To save face, CDU/CSU members repeatedly made it clear in the press, as well as in heated discussions with Turkish government officials, that the law did not constitute a forced deportation. During parliamentary debates throughout 1983, Federal Labor Minister Norbert Blüm assured critics that the key word in the law’s title was “voluntary.” Invoking the politically correct term “foreign fellow citizens” (ausländische Mitbürger), Blüm framed the law as a voluntary collaboration between the government and guest worker families. The law, in Blüm’s words, was “simply an offer.” Because the law’s foundation was “voluntariness,” it “cannot be exercised against the will of our foreign fellow citizens, but rather only with them … Therefore, it cannot be a law against the foreigners, but rather it is a law for our foreign fellow citizens.”³³ Blüm further insisted that the law would benefit the guest workers not only financially but also psychologically. After years of “unclarity” and “sitting on packed suitcases,” they could finally decide to go home.³⁴

Yet, with the dual pressures of unemployment and racism, the law’s voluntariness came into question. Although the Federal Senate (Bundesrat) overwhelmingly supported the law, opposition parties in the parliament saw through the guise of generosity. In an extensive debate just two weeks before the law was passed, Green Party representative Gabriele Potthast argued that the law conceded to the population’s “fears” and “racist attitudes” and subjected foreigners to “moral, psychological, and political pressure.” The SPD, despite having initially developed earlier versions of the law under Helmut Schmidt’s chancellorship, now changed its tune. The law, argued SPD representative Rudolf Dreßler, constituted a “deportation premium” and “bargain for the government” that “incites Ausländerfeindlichkeit.” Even when factoring in their employee social security contributions, Dreßler argued that guest workers would spend much of the payout on their journey home. In his party’s estimation, moving a two-and-a-half-bedroom apartment from Stuttgart to Istanbul would cost 6,000 DM on average and up to 8,000 DM if a guest worker traveled even farther to Mersin or Sivas along the Anatolian coast. But FDP representative Carl-Junius Cronenberg, whose party supported the law as the CDU/CSU’s coalition partner, pointed out the SPD’s “hypocrisy” and noted that they had no ground on which to stand.³⁵

Outside parliamentary chambers, efforts to frame the law as voluntary and magnanimous failed miserably.³⁶ DGB board member Siegfried Bleicher called the law a “false,” “illusionary,” and socially irresponsible “political miscarriage,” and IG Metall condemned it as a “continuation of the federal government’s kicking out policy” (Figure 5.3).³⁷ For Die Tageszeitung, the 10,500 DM was just “pocket money for an uncertain future.”³⁸ A Spiegel article titled “Take Your Premium and Get Out” featured a photograph of a Turkish family loading their belongings into their van and was captioned “Splendid deal for the Germans.”³⁹ One Turkish migrant called the law “singularly and solely about saving the German state the social services to which these foreigners are legally entitled.”⁴⁰ Ordinary Germans expressed their concerns in letters to the editor of Stern, noting that they were “ashamed” that politicians were rendering migrants “powerless” and “watching the deportation of the Turks with vicious delight.”⁴¹ Although foreign workers were “oppressed” elsewhere, “only the Germans have a special ability to make these people suffer, both as a society and a state.” If “parties who call themselves ‘Christian’” ever opened the Bible, perhaps they would learn the scripture: “Love thy neighbor as you love yourself.”

Figure 5.3 Cover of Metall, the magazine of the metalworkers trade union, opposing the remigration law, 1983. The text reads: “Toiled for us – and now out? The pressure on our foreign fellow citizens is becoming increasingly inhumane.”

© IG Metall, used with permission.

While the state of West Berlin preempted the federal government by passing its own version of a remigration law in July 1983, other local governments warned against the detrimental effects of a mass exodus of Turks.⁴² In a report called “Zero Hour,” referencing the abrupt transition after the fall of Nazism in 1945, the city of Düsseldorf conjured an apocalyptical vision of what would happen when the last guest worker left. The report predicted that Düsseldorf would lose much more than “the pizzeria on the corner” (a stand-in for guest workers’ beloved gastronomic contributions) and the guest workers’ “friendliness,” “warmth,” and “hospitality” (stereotypical personality traits that contrasted with Germans’ cold affect). Local businesses would lose at least 50 million DM in revenue. Public transportation would literally screech to a halt, as local trains employed nearly 500 foreign workers. Amid declining German birthrates, the loss of foreign children would force kindergartens and elementary schools to close. The dilapidated buildings in the large housing blocks where guest workers lived would continue to deteriorate – surely, the report maintained, no Germans would want to live under such poor conditions, and no landlords would be interested in investing there. The message was clear. As the headline of an article on the Düsseldorf report put it: “Germany Could Not Survive Without the Foreigners.”⁴³

The Turkish government, too, took up the call for resistance. The two countries’ labor ministers, Norbert Blüm and Turhan Esener, clashed on the remigration law in a July 1983 meeting in Ankara. The meeting made it clear, in the words of Der Tagesspiegel, that the Turkish government had “no understanding for Bonn’s problems with the more than 4.6 million foreigners – a third of them Turks – in the Federal Republic.” Calling the proposed law “inappropriate,” “unacceptable,” and “detrimental to our workers,” Esener expressed concerns that Bonn would impose harsher measures against Turkish guest worker families if the law failed to achieve its goals.⁴⁴ Returning guest workers, Esener added ominously, “will be doomed to misery.”⁴⁵ At a press conference later that month, Turkish Minister President Bülent Ulusu called the remigration law “unjust and to the disadvantage of our workers” and urged the West German government not to “resort to measures not supported by the Turkish government.”⁴⁶ Ulusu demanded further that the West German government pay out the returning guest workers’ social security payments, remaining unemployment premiums, and child allowance money in full.

Yet even the prospect of deteriorating bilateral relations did not deter Kohl’s government from passing the law on November 28, 1983. Although the Turkish government continued to oppose all forms of return migration out of a fear of declining remittances, Turkish policymakers finally accepted their inability to influence West German domestic policy and resigned themselves to an anticipated influx of 70,000 return migrants – a vast underestimation of the approximately 250,000 men, women, and children who would return within the following ten months.⁴⁷ Official condemnation of the law, however, persisted. Three months after the law was passed, Turkish minister Mesut Yılmaz complained colorfully: “After an invitation sealed in gold ink, they now want to send the Turkish workers home like squeezed-out lemons.”⁴⁸

To Stay or to Leave?

“The time has come to make a decision,” wrote guest worker İlyas Suran in a poem. “The Germans have run out of marks and jobs. It makes no sense to stay here any longer. … Helmut Kohl no longer cares about us.” He continued powerfully: “Do not stay stuck between two mountains. Do not estrange yourself from your nation. Do not end your life in a foreign land. Go on your way friend, back to Turkey.”⁴⁹ As a young man, Suran had migrated from Gaziantep to West Germany as a textile worker and had turned to poetry and music to quell his homesickness. While he chose not to return until the 1990s, his poem captures Turkish migrants’ collective spirit as they navigated both the challenge and the opportunity that the 1983 remigration law presented. Should they stay, or should they leave?

Although the CDU publicly praised the remigration law as a “full success,” Kohl failed to achieve his goal of reducing the Turkish population by 50 percent.⁵⁰ As the June 30, 1984, application deadline neared, the Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet reported that Turkish guest workers “show less interest than expected.”⁵¹ The meager 10,500 DM and the loss of their employer social security contributions turned off most guest workers, who knew they would encounter difficulties in Turkey’s struggling economy. Others stayed in Germany for personal or family reasons, or out of fear of losing their freedom of mobility between the two countries. Still, the remigration law prompted one of the largest mass remigrations in modern European history. In 1984 alone, 15 percent of the Turkish immigrant population – approximately 250,000 men, women, and children – made the difficult decision to leave a country where they had lived for over a decade.

The law’s implementation had a rough start. Beginning on December 1, 1983, the day the law went into effect, the six employees of the Rhineland-Palatinate State Insurance Agency in Düsseldorf were bombarded with an average of 240 guest workers per day, primarily Turks, demanding the immediate cash payout of their social security.⁵² This rush continued through January 1984. The Neue-Ruhr-Zeitung reported that the workers who “stormed” the office reacted with “resignation, disappointment, and outbursts of anger” when they learned that they would lose their employer contributions and that they would receive the money only after they could provide proof of having exited West German borders. Others were dismayed that individuals who had become unemployed before the October 30, 1983, cutoff or had not worked reduced hours (Kurzarbeit) for the past six months were ineligible. One man shouted at a social security advisor, “Even upon our departure, we are financing your pension!” “I always had the impression that my countrymen were being scammed,” another concurred.⁵³ Overall, this experience was consistent with accusations that the law did not have guest workers’ best interests in mind.

Although statistics varied, the 10,500 DM premium proved far less attractive than the social security payouts. By mid-January 1984, two months into the program’s eight-month application period, only 3,200 people had applied for the 10,500 DM.⁵⁴ While policymakers were delighted that 80 percent of the applicants were Turks, they lamented that this number amounted to only one out of every ten who were eligible.⁵⁵ In late February, the DGB reported that only 4,200 out of 300,000 eligible workers of all nationalities had applied for the 10,500 DM premium – “less than a drop on the hot stone.”⁵⁶ To sweeten the deal, the government permitted returning workers to receive up to 75 percent of the premium and the employee social security refund before they returned to Turkey if they paid a small upfront fee.⁵⁷ Applications for social security payouts immediately skyrocketed, outpacing applications for the 10,500 DM premium eightfold. All in all, the Labor Ministry reported that 16,833 applicants of all nationalities – 14,459, or 86 percent, of whom were Turks – were accepted for the 10,500 DM premium, and 2,500 were rejected as not fulfilling all the law’s conditions. Whereas the government initially estimated that 55,000 people would apply for their social security contributions, a massive 140,000 applicants – 120,000 of whom were Turks – chose to do so.⁵⁸ Of those, 70 percent took the new option to receive the money while still in Germany so they could finance the expensive homeward journey without succumbing to shady loan sharks.⁵⁹ Hasan Karabiber, an advisor at the Workers’ Welfare Organization in Ingolstadt, confirmed that the social security payout – not the 10,500 DM – was the crucial factor motivating the workers he had advised.⁶⁰

Eager to rid themselves of unwanted Turkish workers and avoid mass layoffs, private companies also seized the opportunity to downsize by offering severance packages to any foreign worker willing to voluntarily quit. The timing was enticing: while they could not receive the full governmental payout until they returned to Turkey, they could cash in on the firm’s severance package immediately. Ruhrkohle AG, a large mining company in Essen and the largest West German employer of Turkish citizens, was among the first to pursue this strategy. By June 1984, 2,700 Turkish workers – or every eighth foreign worker at the company – had taken a severance package of approximately 11,200 DM.⁶¹ An internal study boasted that 26.5 percent of all the men who had taken the government’s remigration premium had been employed at Ruhrkohle AG.⁶² The Gelsenkirchen mining company Bergbau AG Lippe followed suit. Employees who quit before the remigration law’s June 30, 1984, application deadline would receive two-and-a-half months of wages, the remainder of their paid vacation days for the whole year, and a 2,600 DM Christmas bonus – all tax-free.⁶³ Combining all the incentives, Bergbau AG Lippe estimated that a Turkish worker with two children could return to his or her homeland with a hefty amount of cash: 58,481 DM if the worker had been with the company for over twelve years, and 64,929 DM for a period of employment in excess of eighteen years.⁶⁴

Guest workers’ reasons for leaving were not only financial. The Turkish Central Bank reported that over 80 percent of the applicants were men between thirty-eight and fifty-five years of age who had lived in West Germany between ten and twenty years.⁶⁵ Nearly all were married with at least one child, and 70 percent had children who lived in Turkey. The vast majority earned 1,000–3,000 DM per month, meaning that the 10,500 DM premium barely amounted to a year of their salary. Eighteen percent were motivated by the 10,500 DM premium initially, while 93 percent attributed their final decision to the social security payouts and 8 percent to the employer severance packages. The Center for Turkish Studies offered a more complex portrait. Only one-third of the surveyed return migrants attributed their decision primarily to financial reasons – split between having already reached their financial goals (16 percent), being unemployed (8 percent), wanting to retire (4 percent), and planning to start their own small businesses in Turkey (6 percent).⁶⁶ For 10 percent of the migrants, either homesickness, personal/family reasons, their children’s education, or old age/illness was the primary motivator. Approximately 5 percent each were leaving on account of integration problems, because they no longer wanted to live in Germany, or because they missed their family and friends in Turkey. Despite the varying statistics, the pattern is clear: individual decisions were motivated by a complex constellation of financial, personal, and familial reasons in which the remigration law played a supporting role.⁶⁷

Even though racism was just one of many reasons, the Turkish media emphasized it in numerous reports on returning guest workers – even before the remigration law came into effect (Figure 5.4). One man told Milliyet that he was returning because Germans treated Turks “like dogs” or “as though we had leprosy,” similar to how he had seen African-Americans treated in an American film.⁶⁸ Other men told Cumhuriyet that they feared the “Turks, get out!” graffiti and the “aggressive German youths with motorcycles … Enough already!”⁶⁹ The most extensive account came from Turkish novelist Bekir Yıldız, who wrote a series of Cumhuriyet articles based on his interactions with return migrants even before the remigration law was passed. “Perhaps if Turks had blonde hair, blue eyes, and could speak proper German, Germans would not consider them foreigners,” one man quipped. “Christians and Muslims are incompatible,” another asserted, and now “we are in the situation of the old Jews.” Just like “how Hitler did it,” the Germans “will slaughter people on the streets.”⁷⁰ In short, Yıldız implied, guest workers who went back to Turkey did not return feeling wealthy and triumphant but rather like “prisoners” who had been locked up in Germany for fifteen years.⁷¹

Figure 5.4 Cartoon in Hürriyet emphasizing West German racism as a main reason for return migration, ca. 1984. The text states: “In my opinion, the most effective remigration incentives are some people’s facial expressions.”

© Oğuz Peker, used with permission.

Yet, because Turkish guest workers were not a homogenous population, the decision to stay or leave was far more complicated. Ethnic, religious, and political affiliations circumscribed their mobility, especially because the 1983 remigration law came three years after 1980 Turkey’s military coup. Understandably, guest workers who were political leftists or who were members of Turkey’s internal ethnic minority groups like Kurds and Yazidis feared that upon their return they would be arrested, tortured, or executed. They also knew that if they wished to reenter West Germany yet again to escape persecution, they would face a dual set of barriers: they would not only be subject to West Germany’s harsh visa restrictions against Turkish citizens, in general, but they would also likely be denied asylum.⁷² For them, staying in West Germany – even if they wished to return with the remigration premium – was far preferable to precarity in Turkey.

Sometimes, guest workers’ fates depended on circumstances beyond their control, such as old age or illness. Guest workers’ parents who remained in Turkey, now in their twilight years, sometimes begged their middle-aged children to take care of them or to spend time together before they died. Forty-eight-year-old Osman İşleyen wanted to stay in Germany after living there for fifteen years but resigned himself to returning to his hometown of Burdur. His eighty-year-old mother had fallen ill and could no longer tend to their farm, nor raise his three children who lived with her.⁷³ Burcu İkçilli’s family was deterred from returning by her father’s health condition. Although her father had planned to quit his job just two weeks before the remigration law’s application deadline, he had suffered a severe work accident and had broken three vertebrae. His seven-month hospital stay prevented his family from returning to Turkey, even though he had already purchased a home there and furnished it with German furniture brought back on their summer vacations. Fifteen years later, they still had not returned and had resorted to renting their Turkish house to a family with three children. The story turned tragic: an earthquake destroyed the house and killed all three children.⁷⁴

Many guest workers decided to stay because they viewed the remigration law with “skepticism,” “insecurity,” and “mistrust,” and they knew that returning to Turkey would mean losing their freedom of mobility between the two countries.⁷⁵ Although Necla and Ünsal Ö. had strongly considered taking the premium, a German colleague convinced Ünsal otherwise. Anyone taking the money was “an idiot,” the colleague insisted, because they would only be receiving their employee social security contributions and foregoing their employer contributions.⁷⁶ The couple also did not want to detach themselves from West Germany, where they had lived for two decades, and they knew that taking the premium would mean relinquishing their residence permits at a time of heightened visa restrictions on Turkish citizens. Ultimately, Necla and Ünsal decided to return to Turkey in the 1990s, retiring in the quaint beach town of Şarköy rather than their bustling home city of Istanbul. In an interview thirty years later, the couple expressed no regrets, because their decision to wait allowed them to maintain their lives in both countries, and they could still travel back and forth on their annual vacations.

For many families, the decision to stay or leave was unclear. Murad B., a self-identified “suitcase child” who was born in Germany but sent to Istanbul to live with his grandparents, recalled that his parents had repeatedly promised to return. They had even stored unopened boxes of German consumer goods in their attic, in anticipation of one day bringing them to Turkey. Although the 10,500 DM remigration premium was “clearly attractive” to Murad’s parents, and although they feared the rising racism, his parents lived well and had become accustomed to life in Germany. “They traveled, they had a car, they were driving to places they probably never could have gone to otherwise,” Murad explained, and “they didn’t want to let go of these possibilities.” Crucial to his parents’ decision was that his father, like thousands of former guest workers, had opened his own business.⁷⁷ Returning to Turkey – with or without the 10,500 DM premium – would require him to close his relatively lucrative tailor shop and try his luck in Turkey’s volatile economy. The tailor shop had also given his parents “very good contact” with German customers, whom they considered close friends. Murad’s parents were thus left wavering back and forth – “Are we going, are we not? Are we going, are we not?” – and eventually decided to stay.⁷⁸ Thousands of miles away, Murad continued to see his parents and younger sister only during their vacations.

The Uğur family, profiled in a West German television report, was also split along a generational divide. The father, Ali, had become unemployed, and the meager unemployment money was insufficient to feed his wife and three children. His thirty-six-year-old wife, Nezat, also wished to return to Turkey, since she felt isolated and missed her large family, especially her female relatives. For both parents, the rising racism of recent years was cause for concern. The tea house that Ali frequently visited had recently been vandalized: rowdy German youths had thrown a rock through the window, sprayed graffiti reading “Foreigners out!” on the walls, and attacked a Turkish customer. But Ali and Nezat also had to act in the best interest of their children, who loved living in Germany. The youngest two spoke German fluently and had many friends at their kindergarten. The older daughter, Şerife, was earning all “A”s in her middle school and was worried about switching to a Turkish school. The Uğur family was thus relegated to a liminal position between staying and leaving, perched on a generational divide.⁷⁹

Whereas the Uğurs wanted to keep their children in Germany, other parents returned precisely because they wanted to prevent the “Germanization” of their children, who had long been derided as Almancı. In a survey of eighteen returning families, 62 percent of parents cited “problems of the children” as a main motivation for their return, while another study attributed many decisions to the “fear that children could too strongly Germanize.”⁸⁰ “We came here to escape Germanization and to become real Turks,” one teenage boy explained.⁸¹ Echoing longstanding discourses about the cultural estrangement of “Almancı children,” parents feared the dual loss of their children’s Turkish language skills and Muslim faith. For Yaşar Fuad, who identified as a pious Muslim, returning to Turkey was a means of “saving one’s child,” since integration necessarily entailed “forgetting God’s commandments” and “acting like Christians.” Children exposed to Germany for too long would become gâvur, a derogatory term for non-Muslims, and would engage in “sinful” (günah) and “forbidden” (haram) behaviors like abandoning prayer and study of the Koran, eating pork, drinking alcohol, disrespecting elders, and having premarital sex.⁸²

Since most Turks who applied for the remigration premium were married men who returned with their wives and children, the story of Fatma Koçyiğit stands out. Born in Gaziantep, the forty-eight-year-old woman had followed her husband to Germany in 1970 and begun working as a maid in hotels and restaurants. Although she sorely wished to return to Turkey, her husband had underestimated Turkey’s high inflation rate and could not afford to purchase a farm there. Soon, Fatma discovered that her husband was cheating on her with their neighbor’s daughter and that he wanted a divorce. When she asked for money for their children, her now ex-husband beat her – but, not knowing German, she did not go to the police. After sending her children back to Turkey to stay with relatives, Fatma became so “depressed” and “anxious” that she needed to be hospitalized and was fired from her job. But since she did not have a work permit, she could not receive unemployment benefits. In the meantime, her ex-husband was imprisoned for possessing marijuana, leaving him unable to provide any financial support. Fearing that she would “die alone,” Fatma decided that her only option was to “bow my head,” wait to receive the remigration premium, and finally “return from this hell.”⁸³ Yet given that the government rejected thousands of applications for the premium, Fatma’s future was likely insecure.

After they made their difficult decisions, the 250,000 men, women, and children who left Turkey with the remigration premium now embarked upon a mass exodus – packing their bags and hustling back to Turkey before the September 30, 1984, deadline for exiting West German borders (Figures 5.5 and 5.6). At the local level, the effects of this mass exodus were especially visible in cities with high Turkish populations. One of the most extreme cases was the Ruhr city of Duisburg, home to numerous coal and steel factories like Ruhrkohle, Thyssen, Krupp, and Mannesmann. “If the Turks go,” warned the Bonner Rundschau, Duisburg will turn into a “ghost town.”⁸⁴ That prophecy came true: by mid-February 1984, nearly 4,000 Turks, had left the city.⁸⁵

Figure 5.5 A Turkish family packs their van with all their possessions, preparing to return to Turkey permanently after taking the remigration premium, 1984.

© akg-images/Guenay Ulutuncok, used with permission.

Figure 5.6 Turkish women in Kreuzberg pack their cars and say goodbye as they await their families’ departure, 1985.

© Bayerische Staatsbibliothek/stern-Fotoarchiv/Jürgen Müller-Schneck, used with permission.

Over half the Turks who left Duisburg lived in Hüttenheim, a neighborhood pejoratively nicknamed “Türkenheim” because every eleventh resident was Turkish.⁸⁶ Nearly all of them had received severance packages from the local steel plant Mannesmann AG. Although company spokespeople would not admit it, Mannesmann’s climate was decidedly racist. Hasan Özen, who began working at Mannesmann in 1966 and was elected to the employee council of the metalworkers’ trade union IG Metall in 1975, recalled that his German colleagues repeatedly exclaimed phrases like “Dead Turk!” and “Turks out!” – which implied that “I should leave Germany, otherwise they’d kill me.” While Özen dismissed these coworkers as “just a couple of idiots,” many of his Turkish colleagues took the rising racism as a cue to leave.⁸⁷ Turkish employees at Mannesmann also cited the rising racism in a new discriminatory company policy. The board had recently mandated that all employees take an allegedly “subject-oriented” mathematics and language test to determine which workers’ language skills made them suitable for higher-level tasks. The exam had the indirect, although intentional, effect of motivating workers’ decisions to leave. As a local Turkish social worker who had counseled many Mannesmann employees explained, the language test created a “competitive atmosphere” in which “everyone believed that they would lose their job tomorrow.”⁸⁸ Derviş Zabo, who had worked at Mannesmann for fourteen years and had become a foreman, expressed his anxieties about his lack of job security in a 1984 interview: “If I do not pass the test, Mannesmann will probably send me to a temp job firm, and the temp firm will want to give us other random jobs, like road maintenance or digging trenches.”⁸⁹

As Mannesmann employees and their families abruptly left their homes, West German journalists descended on Duisburg-Hüttenheim. A ten-page photo essay in the West German magazine Stern, which also circulated to Turkish readers, told the story from the migrants’ perspective.⁹⁰ Titled “The Expellees” (Die Heimatvertriebenen), in reference to the mass migration of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe after the Second World War, the article aimed to attract sympathy. The photographs depict men on a train platform staring wistfully into the distance, old women in headscarves hugging one another, and children watching somberly as a group of men lug a washing machine into a moving van. The captions were mournful and foreboding: “Goodbye in Duisburg-Hüttenheim… Hugs, kisses, tears. Compassion for the old and young who are leaving Germany forever – and for those who are staying in the Turk-Ghetto (Türken-Ghetto). Will they also have to go soon?” The article went beyond most German portrayals, however, as the journalist drove with a former Mannesmann employee and his family back to their hometown of Kahramanmaraş, reporting on both their excitement and misgivings.

In a Die Zeit article also republished in the Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet, a German teacher in Hüttenheim shared her perspective on the mass departure. She described the scene as both somber and chaotic – a mad dash to leave with as many West German consumer goods as possible. “Already many windows are missing their flower boxes, and cardboard boxes piled high are awaiting their transport,” she marveled. “Almost daily the Duisburg department stores are delivering goods that will be taken to the homeland: washing machines, television sets, video recorders, and entire living room furniture sets.”⁹¹ As predicted in the City of Düsseldorf’s foreboding “Zero Hour” report, she emphasized that the mass exodus bore serious consequences for the local economy. Duisburg’s business owners complained about a loss in profits of up to 50 percent. Shops had closed, and many feared layoffs of German employees.⁹² The demographic changes also affected schools, where 80 percent of students were Turkish. By the end of 1984, one of the second-grade classes in Hüttenheim was predicted to have only six or seven children left.

Although she attempted to empathize with her students, the Hüttenheim teacher problematically exoticized Turkish culture and reinforced tropes of Turkish backwardness. “We are not letting go of ‘our’ Turks with light hearts,” she lamented. She would miss the exciting street festivals featuring kebab and Turkish pizza, honey-soaked cakes, and girls wearing colorful “traditional” clothing. Likewise, she would miss seeing the trash containers spill over the lawn, the elderly women in ruffled skirts crouching down on the ground knitting to pass the time, the loud calls of “Öğretmen, öğretmen!” (Teacher, teacher!), and the need to develop new modes of communication based on hand and foot gestures. All of these gave her the feeling of “being far away – somewhere on vacation.” By contrast, she noted that German parts of the city were far less exciting, with their pristine white houses, perfectly trimmed hedges, and orderly flowers. The only sign of children was a lone German girl wheeling back and forth on her tricycle, warned by her parents not to venture beyond the front lawn.⁹³ Most troubling to her, the fate of the Turkish children whom she had worked so tirelessly to educate and integrate was bleak – particularly for the girls. Not only would they be perceived as “Germanized” in Turkey, but, echoing derogatory critiques of Turkey’s allegedly patriarchal culture, she feared that they would quickly be forced into marriage and motherhood. “What awaits them? … In a few years, will these outgoing girls, who are so eager to learn, turn into fat, worn-out women like most of their mothers?”

However problematic, the article revealed the underacknowledged reality that the decision to leave had consequences not only for Turkish migrants but also for Germans. After up to two decades of living and working in West Germany, Turkish guest workers and their children had undoubtedly become part of German society. But when border officials stamped their residence permits “invalid,” they also stamped out their lives, friendships, and connections in West Germany – leaving only memories. As Germans watched them leave, emotions were mixed. While those who embraced the racist cry “Turks out!” cheered with delight, others truly mourned their absence. The situation had flipped. When guest workers first stepped onto the trains to West Germany in the 1960s and early 1970s, they waved goodbye to the loved ones they left behind. Over a decade later, upon the mass exodus of 1984, they stood outside their homes in German cities and waved goodbye not only to their Turkish neighbors and friends, but also – especially for children – to their German ones. School classes held goodbye parties for Turkish students who were leaving, neighbors exchanged parting gifts, and sobbing friends savored last hugs at the airport. In both moments, the rupture was both exhilarating and heartbreaking.

Unrealized Dreams

“We killed our passports,” return migrants regularly noted, expressing the seeming irreversibility and permanence of their “final” return.⁹⁴ For the 250,000 men, women, and children who took the 1983 remigration premium and left Germany, the homeward journey came full circle. For their final return, they either stepped onto airplanes or loaded up their cars with all their belongings and drove on the same familiar route that they took on their annual vacations: the Europastraße 5, the treacherous international highway or “road of death” through Austria, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria. But this time, their baggage felt even heavier. While their vacations had always been temporary, a new sense of permanence and anxiety loomed: How would they fare upon their permanent return? Would they come to regret their decision? Would they finally realize their dreams of financial success? While many achieved their dreams, others missed their lives in Germany and encountered harsh difficulties re-integrating into Turkish society. Although they remained derided as “Germanized,” the stereotype of the wealthy Almancı did not always materialize and many found themselves not only socially ostracized but also financially bankrupt. As Der Tagesspiegel put it bluntly, “This homeland may be more foreign to them than Berlin-Kreuzberg, Cologne-Ehrenfeld, or the Ruhr region.”⁹⁵ Cumhuriyet concurred, turning the concept of “integration” on its head: “Life abroad is over. Now they must get used to Turkey.”⁹⁶

Even before the 1983 remigration law was passed, customs officials at the Bulgarian-Turkish border at Kapıkule were already estimating a problematically large increase in border traffic. In 1982, the border authorities had reported that approximately twenty or twenty-five families passed through the border for permanent remigration each day, but they expected to be overrun in 1984.⁹⁷ Officials were aware that this situation would be “different” than the traffic and chaos even during peak vacation season, and they were already building new inspection sites along the border to accommodate what they anticipated to be kilometer-long queues of guest workers transporting all their possessions and furniture, all of which needed to be inspected and accounted for on customs forms. The officials estimated that they could only accommodate 300 cars of returnees per day, and already the border guards and returning workers were “drowning” in the paperwork, with lost passports and incomplete customs forms.⁹⁸

As anticipated, the scene at Kapıkule in the months before the September 30, 1984, deadline was far more chaotic than it had ever been on their vacations. A Cumhuriyet reporter accompanied guest workers on the long drive back from Germany to Turkey along the Europastraße 5 – through the border check points at Austria, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria – the same drive they had made so many times before. He drove along with one guest worker, who was heading back from West Berlin to his home village of Bakırköy. At Kapıkule, the border guards were so swamped that they resorted to dividing the cars into two lines – one for the returning workers and one for vacationers. “It takes half a day to complete the paperwork,” the reporter noted. “In the remaining half day, the car is searched.” A border guard quoted in the article further explained the delay: “Even if all the officers are mobilized in July and August, it will still take three or four days for all the cars to enter.” Finally, the guest worker and the accompanying reporter passed through the border in one and a half days and unpacked his bags in Bakırköy – everything he had to show for thirteen years of his labor.⁹⁹

But not all returning guest workers could breathe a sigh of relief as they unpacked their bags and settled into their homes in Turkey. Due to problems implementing the 1983 remigration law, many encountered immediate financial hardship. In the first four months after the September 30, 1984, deadline, the Braunschweig Labor Office received over one hundred handwritten letters from returning guest workers who had not yet received their money. Hursit U., who provided the most detail, described the convoluted process. In May 1984, after being advised by the Turkish language interpreter at the Braunschweig Labor Office, Hursit had filled out an application for the remigration premium. He was assigned a “remigration assistance number” and received a letter confirming that he had fulfilled all the requirements. The next step was crucial: upon exiting West German borders at either the airport or along the highway, Hursit needed to present two copies of a red and green “Confirmation of Border Crossing Form” for the border guards to sign and stamp. While Hursit was supposed to keep the green copy for his own record, the red copy went through a complex paper trail. The border guard had to forward the red copy to the Federal Labor Office, which would then forward it to the local Braunschweig Labor Office. Only upon the red copy’s arrival in Braunschweig could the money transfer begin. The money would be transferred to the bank account and address that Hursit had provided.

Certainly, there were several places where this complex chain could break down. Many returning guest workers who wrote to the Braunschweig Labor Office were unaware that they were supposed to have the form officially signed and stamped by a border official. Nor were some border officials aware of their responsibility to mail the red copy to the Federal Labor Office. Instead, they simply handed both signed and stamped copies back to the guest workers. Mustafa K. admitted that he had “clumsily” given the form to a friend in Hanover, and Mestan P. had handed the form to a friend who was waving goodbye to them at the airport.¹⁰⁰ Two men had given the form to the travel agent from whom they had bought the plane tickets.¹⁰¹ Others, who had chosen to drive home, opted to send the form via post at various stops along the international highway Europastraße 5. One man mailed it from an Austrian post office in Salzburg, and Hayrettin Ö. put it in a mailbox as soon as he crossed the Bulgarian-Turkish border.¹⁰²

Problems arose even when guest workers properly submitted their forms at the West German border. One German man wrote to the Federal Labor Ministry complaining that his colleagues had witnessed the lackadaisical attitudes of the border guards at the Cologne Airport. “The personnel employed at this border protection station were apparently so overloaded,” he wrote, “that it was no longer possible to issue the required border confirmation to the departing Turks.”¹⁰³ Shockingly, “many of the officials were on a coffee break!” Overwhelmingly, however, border officials deflected blame onto the guest workers. Pejoratively, the Border Police Directorate complained that only half of the “partially illiterate foreigners” exiting through the Hanover Airport had accurately filled out their forms. The resulting quarrels and confusion led to “unacceptable impairments on border police control” and a “break-down of flight operations.”¹⁰⁴ No matter who was to blame, confusion about what to do with a double-sided piece of red paper curiously led to a deterioration of West German state control.

Aware of the possibility for confusion at the border, the West German Foreign Office had authorized a backup procedure: anyone who neglected to have their forms signed, stamped, and submitted by the border officials could physically go to a West German embassy or consulate in Turkey to deliver it in person by the September 30 deadline.¹⁰⁵ But even this option led to chaos. Der Tagesspiegel described the “hectic and even tumultuous scene” at the West German Consulate Office in Istanbul in the days before the deadline. Four hundred returning guest workers were “crowding the steps” of the building, and many had slept there overnight, leaving the consular officials “totally overextended,” “close to a nervous breakdown,” and “on the verge of tirades.”¹⁰⁶ Submitting the form to diplomatic offices also posed a problem for returning guest workers. Since the embassy and consulates were located only in major cities, those returning to smaller towns and villages had to make an additional costly and time-consuming trek. This provision proved especially problematic for one man, whose village was located 700 kilometers east of the nearest diplomatic office. Frustrated to find the embassy closed when he passed through Ankara during his drive home, he refused to make another trip. Instead, he put the form in the mail and hired a Düsseldorf-based financial agent to ask about the status of his premium.¹⁰⁷

Transferring the money into Turkish bank accounts presented another source of confusion. Despite submitting his form properly, Şevki K. checked all his bank accounts but found no money in his name: “I went to Fakat Bank and even telephoned the bank in Ankara and the Merkez Bank in Istanbul. I called them one by one … Which bank was it sent to?”¹⁰⁸ The comments in the margins of the letters to the Braunschweig Labor Office provide some insight into what might have happened. Repeatedly, labor office officials insisted that they had already transferred the money months before. On Bekir M.’s letter, one official expressed his frustration with an exclamation point: “Sent to the above-named account on July 10!”¹⁰⁹ The case of Halil A. is particularly revealing. In his letter, Halil requested that the Labor Office transfer his social security contributions to Ziraat Bank in Torbalı. The marginalia, however, indicates that the Labor Office had already sent the money three months prior in the name of a certain “Mehmet A.,” likely a friend or relative of Halil, to the Sparkasse Regional Bank in Horb am Necker.¹¹⁰

Having failed to receive their money, the letter writers expressed financial difficulties. Halil S. put it bluntly: “I regret coming back.”¹¹¹ “I really need the money,” wrote Ahmet Y., who claimed to have only 20,000 lira left in his wallet.¹¹² Ramazan B. described his situation in more dire terms: “There are five of us here (my children and I), and we have run out of money.”¹¹³ Şevki K., who had hoped to retire from manual labor after over a decade of working in the Peine Steel Work in Salzgitter, found himself once again seeking factory employment.¹¹⁴ Others needed the remigration premium and social security payout as start-up capital for their own small businesses. Necati T., who also wanted to start his own business, described his and his family’s situation more positively: “We got to Turkey safe and sound … Turkey really is beautiful. Everyone is happy here. Now my only concern is whether or not I will be able to start my own business here. God willing, I will be the boss of my own workplace.”¹¹⁵

The delay in the payment was especially troubling because many guest workers had spent large quantities of money preparing for the homeward journey itself. Like during their annual vacations, family and friends at home expected gifts, and coming home empty-handed signaled both selfishness and economic failure. But now even more crucial was the need to load up their cars with German consumer goods, likely for the last time, to furnish their homes in Turkey. In the months and days before leaving, they rushed to buy furniture, refrigerators, washing machines, televisions, video recorders, and other household appliances.¹¹⁶ As Cumhuriyet reported, “The remigration premium and social security money enter Turkey not as marks but as goods.” The West German government successfully “hit several birds with one stone,” as guest workers spent the money to “stimulate the German shopping market.”¹¹⁷ But, because they could only receive the entire payout once they had exited German borders, many financed these purchases with loans from shady creditors who charged exorbitant interest rates of up to 50 percent.¹¹⁸

Once they had their finances in order, they settled into their new lives in Turkey. Guest workers overwhelmingly returned to the places where they had been born or had lived prior to migrating to West Germany. But for many, new locales were appealing. One survey reported that 46 percent moved to Turkish cities, 39 percent to towns or large villages, and 15 percent to small villages.¹¹⁹ While statistics about their new employment varied, studies reflected a disconnect between their dreams and the reality. Dispelling the stereotype that returning guest workers dreamt of becoming taxi drivers, a survey the year before the remigration law revealed that guest workers’ most desired sector was overwhelmingly manufacturing (39 percent), followed by trade (23 percent), agriculture (16 percent), service (13 percent), construction (6 percent), and transportation (3 percent).¹²⁰ By the end of 1986, however, another survey reported that only 10 percent actually owned manufacturing firms.¹²¹ This discrepancy owed in large part to the high start-up cost of factory equipment, which – even with their 10,500 DM and employee social security contributions in hand – most guest workers simply could not afford.

For many guest workers, the dream of owning a small business turned into a nightmare. Having underestimated Turkey’s economic crisis and hyperinflation, they set up businesses that flopped, and many went bankrupt. Surely, guest workers who returned with the 1983 remigration law could have anticipated these failures. In the months before the mass exodus, horror stories and news articles on the subject were rampant in both countries. The editor of Blickpunkt reported on numerous businesses that had failed in the coastal city of Alanya. A former Ford factory employee named Taner was struggling to keep his ice cream shop afloat. “Children never come by,” he bemoaned. “They don’t have money for an ice cream cone … They would rather jump into the harbor off a slanted piece of wood. It’s cheaper.” Taner’s neighbor, Mehmet, had opened a German artisanal craft shop that sold luxury items like fancy lamps and bronze sculptures. Mehmet was clearly out of touch with the needs of Alanya’s population, who were “busy scrambling together enough money for their basic subsistence.” After losing all their savings, the editor wrote, Taner and Mehmet ironically reverted to the same poverty as before their migration to Germany.¹²²

The most notorious and well-publicized case was that of İsmail Bahadır from Konya, the celebrated “Millionth Guest Worker from Southeastern Europe.” In 1969, at age twenty-four, Bahadır was gifted a brand-new television upon his arrival at the Munich Central Train Station – a symbol of the riches to come. Upon returning to Konya in 1982, however, Bahadır lost 20,000 DM in his twice-bankrupt metalworking firm and had “nothing left” of his 27,000 DM in German social security. After resorting to selling his house, his large family moved into a tiny two-bedroom apartment in a dilapidated building. Bahadır also experienced difficulties “reorienting” himself in the now bustling city, which “was suddenly more than three times as big as before.” Rather than close-knit communities, he encountered only “strangers” who had migrated to the city from the villages. “If you ask me,” Bahadır explained, “when we were in Germany, we did not have as many problems.” If the family had stayed in Germany, they could have saved more money, “and things probably would not have gone as badly as they did here.”¹²³

Reports of unfulfilled dreams and social ostracization increased markedly following the mass exodus. One West German article, tellingly titled “The Almancıs,” reported on forty-two-year-old Muzaffer Kılıç, who had returned to Istanbul in 1984 with his wife and daughter after eleven years working at a manufacturing company in Bremen. Although he was making good money in Turkey in his small store selling natural gas for cooking and heating, he went broke because his liras were “worthless.” Due to Turkey’s exorbitant inflation, his earnings were mere pfennigs compared to the Deutschmarks he made in Germany. “It would have been better if I had not given up my well-paid job in Germany,” he said. “Here I am a foreigner and on top of that still a poor man. I had not expected that.”¹²⁴ Süleyman Taş, whose family returned to Mersin after fifteen years in West Berlin, also felt ostracized. “We are strangers in our own country, too. The adjective ‘foreign’ has stuck with us … They have changed our name to Almancı.”¹²⁵

Just like the initial migration to Germany, the return to Turkey destabilized family life and gender roles. For women who had worked grueling hours in West German factories, returning to Turkey typically meant returning to the domestic sphere – this time, however, as housewives. Although they enjoyed their new middle-class status, they encountered new marital challenges. For many, the gendered division of household labor changed dramatically. Whereas spouses who were both working typically shared housework in West Germany, many new housewives complained that their husbands – whether retirees, wage laborers, or small business owners – now expected them to handle all the cooking, cleaning, and childrearing. “My husband sits at the coffee house all day,” one woman explained. “He expects his food on time and does not help at home. If I am running a bit late, he leaves and goes to a restaurant.”¹²⁶

When they were not doing housework, many women found themselves socially isolated and unsure how to spend their newfound free time. Some did not return to their homes, but rather to big cities where they knew no one. Given that Turkey was still experiencing high levels of internal rural–urban migration, women who returned to villages were dismayed that many of their closest friends and relatives had left for Turkish cities. Even in cases of reunions, years of estrangement had changed social dynamics: it was one thing to chat during a temporary vacation, and another to maintain deep friendships upon a permanent return. One woman reported that village women gossiped about her “because I am an Almancı.” Not only did they mistakenly envy her perceived wealth, but they also perpetuated longstanding tropes about female sexuality abroad. Believing that Germany turned women “corrupt,” they viewed her more “harshly” and “suspiciously” than returning men: “One sideways glance, and they immediately think I have a boyfriend in Germany.”¹²⁷ Over time, however, women began rekindling relationships or forging new ones. Curious for a glimpse inside the “Almancı family’s” house, neighbors came over for tea to chat about the prices and quality of German-made appliances. Though superficial and boring, these conversations often evolved into close friendships that sustained them while their husbands were working or socializing with other men outside the home.

Women’s experiences, however, were not homogenous. Some returned from West Germany alone, either divorced or still mourning their husbands’ deaths. For them, the struggle to reintegrate required finding a new husband or, sometimes with great delight, navigating life in Turkey as a single woman. Many returning mothers assumed new roles as primary caregivers after years of leaving their children behind with grandparents or other relatives in Turkey. Yet given the years of separation, in some cases as long as a decade, they sometimes struggled to establish parental authority and to bond with their children, who in many cases resented being ripped from their grandparents’ home and placed under the care of their “foreign” mother. The situation was different for women whose children had reached adulthood in West Germany and were not required to return with their parents in accordance with the 1983 law. One woman was especially upset that she had returned without her son, an in-debt alcoholic who was having an extramarital affair with an older German woman with three children. For her, reintegrating meant coming to terms not only with the separation of her family, but also with the reality that she would likely be unable to find a Turkish woman for her son to marry.¹²⁸

Amid all these financial and social struggles, the Turkish government was nowhere to be seen. Due to their financially based opposition to the guest workers’ return, officials in Ankara had taken no substantial measures to prepare for their economic or social reintegration. After a decade of Turkey blocking the West German government’s proposal to direct its development aid toward helping guest workers start their own small businesses, the returning guest workers were reaping the bitter consequences. “I didn’t get a single pfennig from the state. I just did it myself,” complained Hüseyin Uysal, who built an automated carpentry factory in Ankara after fourteen years in West Germany.¹²⁹ Süleyman Taş, whose business also failed, expressed a much harsher sense of betrayal. “The state has always expected foreign currency from us, but never offered a helping hand and never spoke out against our oppressors,” he said. “Now the government is not taking care of us when we return.”¹³⁰

To save face, the Turkish government tried but failed to change its tune. In June 1984, in the thick of the mass exodus, Mesut Yılmaz announced that the Turkish government would take measures to integrate returning migrants into the economy. “There is a great need in the industry for workers who are young, experienced, and returning,” he explained, in a vast overstatement of the truth. “Therefore they will be immediately employed.”¹³¹ But that promise was dead on arrival. In reality, the vast majority of returning guest workers were not “young” but rather middle-aged or reaching retirement, and the Turkish government did nothing to ensure their employment – let alone their immediate placement. This neglect persisted throughout the 1980s. In 1988, a Turkish Labor Ministry official told reporters that returning guest workers would receive no special treatment in the allocation of jobs.¹³² The same year, in a press conference with West German journalists organized by the Association of Turkish Chambers of Commerce, Prime Minister Turgut Özal proclaimed: “The Turks who receive unemployment money in the Federal Republic of Germany should stay there and not come back.”¹³³

The complaints of economically struggling returning guest workers did, however, compel the Turkish government to soften its stance on the question of how to spend West German development aid. In November 1984, the two governments revised their previous cooperation on development aid programs as codified in the 1972 Treaty of Ankara. Although they continued to fund Turkish Workers Collectives, the Turkish government now conceded to implementing West Germany’s originally proposed “individual support model,” by which development aid would be directly placed into the hands of returning guest workers. But this time they were more cautious. Rather than the initial idea of offering aid to any guest worker who planned to return, they now restricted the criteria to individuals who had already returned and who already possessed the technical and managerial skills, as well the capital, needed to start their own businesses in industrial sectors. By August 1989, this program had distributed loans of between 50,000 and 70,000 DM to more than 600 returning workers at an advantageous interest rate of 26 percent – nearly half the typical interest rate in Turkey.¹³⁴ But, out of thousands of returning workers, assisting only 600 proved insufficient. The sense of betrayal remained as strong as ever.

*****

For both the West German government and the guest workers themselves, the disputedly “voluntary” 1983 remigration law was not a success story but a cautionary tale. Not only did it concede to the passions of popular racism, but it also failed to achieve the intended outcome. Rather than fulfilling Kohl’s desire to “reduce the Turkish population by 50 percent,” the law prompted only 15 percent to take the money and leave. And, although celebrated as a potential boon to the West German economy, the mass exodus proved a financial disaster. At 180 million DM, the total amount spent on the payout of the 10,500 DM premium plus the additional 1,500 DM per underage child was manageable.¹³⁵ But, at 1.7 billion DM, the need to swiftly refund 140,000 employee social security contributions in 1984 alone proved devastating. By comparison, during the previous three years, the government had only paid out 250,000 DM annually in early employee social security contributions, distributed among 30,000 returning guest workers.¹³⁶ And due to a failure of administrative oversight, some guest workers had received their payout without the two-year waiting period, even though they had not actually left the country.¹³⁷ Although in 1985 these costs dropped substantially, the federal government found itself strapped for liquid cash and forced to dip into its emergency reserve. As policymakers internally lamented this failure, they attempted to publicly save face. The 1983 law, announced the Labor Ministry misleadingly, was a “full success.”¹³⁸

For the migrants themselves, returning to Turkey intensified their sense of estrangement. Turkish scorn for returnees was best captured in a 1984 Hürriyet article, reprinted twice in Der Spiegel, which sensationalized the mass exodus as a belligerent invasion by foreign foes.

It needs not be said who the Almancı are. They are now coming home one after another. And they are bringing Germany with them. If they only brought cars, refrigerators, washing machines, dishwashers, or videos in their moving boxes, it would not be so alarming. But they bring something else very different from Germany, namely everything to which they got accustomed there, and that is the bad thing. Turned entirely inside-out internally, the renegades stroll in arrogantly. What they saw in Germany, they are now looking for here. Every sentence begins with, ‘In Germany.’ We will still have a lot more to endure with these Almancı. And they with us. In the end, one of us will have to give in. We’ll see who.¹³⁹

With this spirited and foreboding call to arms, the existential struggle for Turkey’s national survival was there for all to see. Whether or not they chose to return, by the 1980s all migrants were homogenized into Almancı, feeling estranged even from their own home country.

Citing both social ostracization and economic failure, up to 50 percent of Turks – both the guest workers and their children – regretted the decision to return.¹⁴⁰ Despite their residence permits having been stamped “invalid,” many attempted to return to West Germany. By November 1984, just two months after the end of the mass exodus, the West German Consulate in Izmir reported that dozens of Turks who had taken the money and returned were increasingly applying for West German tourist visas because they regretted their decision.¹⁴¹ “I’d pay back the remigration premium with interest plus interest on the interest,” one man wrote, while another promised he would be willing to work sixteen hours a day if he were allowed to return.¹⁴² But they had no recourse. With the 250,000 men, women, and children finally out of sight and out of mind, the West German government turned its attention to the dealing with the 1.2 million Turks – and over 4 million “foreigners” of all nationalities – who remained. For the Turkish government, which had spent over a decade trying to prevent a mass remigration, assisting with the guest workers’ economic reintegration was simply not a priority. Feeling abandoned by both countries, the return migrants were left to fend for themselves.

Spreading transnationally through both rumors and media accounts, horror stories of guest workers’ unrealized dreams not only supported criticism of the 1983 law’s sinister intentions but also contributed to a stark decline in return migration. After the rate of remigration peaked at 15 percent in 1984, it plummeted to 3–4 percent the following two years – well below its 5.5 percent average in the first three years of the decade – and hovered at just over 2 percent well through the late 1980s and into the 1990s.¹⁴³ Whereas in 1983 the West German government reported that 75 percent of guest workers wanted to return, a 1986 survey revealed that only 19 percent had concrete plans to do so.¹⁴⁴ This decline occurred even in the aftermath of the West German government’s attempt to provide other financial incentives throughout the 1980s, such as the ability to transfer their West German real estate savings accounts to Turkey for building or purchasing houses there.¹⁴⁵ The decline owed not only to the reality that most of the migrants who seriously planned to return had done so in 1984, but also to horror stories of the “economically desolate situation in Turkey,” as the management of the mining firm Ruhrkohle AG put it.¹⁴⁶ It was not uncommon, reported one Turkish journalist, for return migrants to write letters to their friends in Germany warning them, “God willing, stay where you are. We have made a huge mistake.”¹⁴⁷

For the 1.2 million Turkish migrants who remained in West Germany, the decision not to return provided further evidence of their “Germanization.” Friends and relatives in Turkey, who hoped for the return of their loved ones, were often surprised – and even offended – to learn that they were not planning to return anytime soon, even when given the “generous” financial offer of the 1983 remigration law. In the view of the home country, it was not only the migrants’ selfish spending habits, diminishing language skills, and religious abandonment that had transformed them into Almancı but also their fundamental decision to remain abroad. Becoming Almancı, in this sense, was a choice. Not only had the migrants become passively estranged through their exposure to Germany, but they had also actively chosen to estrange themselves.

6 Unhappy in the Homeland

A few months after his parents decided to take the remigration premium and move their family back to Turkey, seventeen-year-old Metin Yümüşak took a sixteen-hour bus ride from Istanbul to the West German Embassy in Ankara and begged for permission to return. But this time, “returning” meant the opposite: leaving Turkey and going back to West Germany. Born and raised in Germany, Metin was barely familiar with Turkey. He struggled to speak Turkish, and he knew the country only from his summer vacations. Though he had hoped to attend one of Turkey’s several elite German schools, he had been rejected amid the surge in applications during the mass exodus of Turkish families in the summer of 1984. After waiting two hours at the embassy with all his documents, however, Metin’s “world collapsed” when his request for a residence permit was categorically denied. “A permanent return to Turkey is permanent,” snarked the consular official. Perhaps, she insisted, Metin should have thought about that before he made his remigration decision. “It was never my decision!” Metin cried.¹

Outside the embassy, Metin had many supporters on his side. Not only did his German principal and teachers write him glowing recommendations, but the donors of his school in Bochum agreed to pay all his living expenses.² With his teachers’ lobbying via letters and phone calls, Metin’s case made it all the way up the governmental hierarchy. Karl Liedtke, a member of the federal parliament from Bochum, implored Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher to grant an exception.³ Upon glancing at Metin’s file, one of Genscher’s staffers marveled that the boy spoke “excellent German” and had a “good report card” with especially high grades in German, mathematics, physics, politics, and sports.⁴ A higher-ranking official agreed, praising Metin as “overwhelmingly integrated into the German environment,” but admitted that his hands were tied: the law was the law.⁵ The only way to make an exception might be to classify Metin as a professional trainee rather than a student, but even so, both the municipal Foreigner Office of Bochum and the Interior Ministry of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia would need to grant permission. The paper trail ended there, leaving Metin caught in “the eternal back and forth” and worried that he would “screw up” his life in Turkey.

For Metin and the thousands of children and teenagers who returned to Turkey with their parents during the mass exodus of summer 1984, the very concept of “return” was fraught. Though labeled “return children” (Rückkehrkinder; kesin dönüș çocuğu) in both countries, many viewed this category as frustratingly inaccurate. At stake in the notion of “return” was not only the physical direction in which they were traveling but also the very meaning of “home” and the fundamental question of identity (Figure 6.1). Whereas children who had spent most of their childhood in Turkey typically viewed the journey as a homecoming, those born and raised abroad like Metin often considered West Germany their home. Turkey, by contrast, was the faraway homeland of their parents, which they knew only from family stories and their limited experiences on their summer vacations. With this variety of experiences, the rigid categories used to describe migration fall apart: for many children of guest workers, leaving West Germany in the 1980s was not a return or a remigration, but rather an immigration to a new country as emigrants from West Germany.

Figure 6.1 A young Turkish child in West Germany waves the Turkish flag – a symbol of his identity and connection to his home country, 1979. © Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo/Alamy Stock Foto, used with permission.

The struggle of these archetypical “return children” was especially pronounced because they also bore the burden of another label: “Almancı children,” or “Germanized children.” As over 100,000 children set foot in Turkey in 1984, abstract anxieties about their cultural estrangement and Germanization became concrete. The Turkish media regurgitated exclusionary tropes with new vigor, reporting with both indignation and sympathy on the rowdy, undisciplined, and sexually promiscuous “lost generation” who barely spoke Turkish and had abandoned Islam. The Turkish government, having spent a decade opposing guest workers’ return migration and doing next to nothing to promote “reintegration,” was utterly unprepared to deal with the influx of Germanized children. To “re-Turkify” them, the Turkish Education Ministry scrambled to haphazardly implement “integration courses” (uyum kursları) to prepare them both linguistically and culturally for the coming school year. By bombarding students with nationalist narratives, on the one hand, and failing to address the students’ actual needs, on the other, these courses inadvertently reinforced the very “problem” they attempted to solve.

Although West German policymakers initially delighted in exporting the burden of integrating these children and teenagers to Turkey, they soon developed sympathy. Sensationalist reports of Turkish teachers’ psychological and physical abuse villainized Turkish parents for uprooting their children from comfortable lives in Germany and forcing them against their will into a dangerous unknown. Amplified amid criticism of Turkey’s authoritarianism following the 1980 military coup, these reports became new ammunition with which to condemn Turkish migrants, as they reinforced the binary assumption that West Germany was “free,” “liberal,” and “democratic,” while Turkish culture was “authoritarian,” “backward,” and “incompatible” with Europe. Though often twisted in the service of racism, expressions of sympathy for the children’s plight compelled a rare relaxation of West German immigration policy. In 1989, just five years after kicking them out, Kohl’s government permitted the children to return once again – this time, not to their parents’ homeland but to the one that many considered their own: Germany (Figure 6.2). Unfortunately for Metin, his petition to the embassy came five years too early.

Figure 6.2 Cartoon depicting a distressed “return child” (Rückkehrkind) forced to remigrate to Turkey with his parents, 1989. The division of the child’s body into black and white represents his identity conflict as both Turkish and German – or for many children, as neither Turkish nor German.

© Erdoğan Karayel, used with permission.

“Re-Turkifying” Germanized Children in the 1970s and 1980s

“Turkey is foreign to me,” wrote the Turkish poet Bahattin Gemici, reflecting on the collective sorrow of archetypal return children. “I couldn’t even get used to the toilets there. And haven’t you heard what they say about me? Some said that I have become irreligious in Germany. Others have laughed about the way I speak. In reality, I am a German Turk. Papa, please let me stay here. I do not want to go to Turkey.”⁶ Filled with sorrow and desperation, this poem is a reminder of how deeply the everyday lives of young migrants were impacted by top-down return migration policies. Beholden to their parents’ decisions, children generally had minimal say in the difficult question of whether to stay or to leave. Yet they were often the ones hit hardest by the challenges of reintegrating.

From the 1973 recruitment stop through the mass exodus of 1984, 43 percent of the migrants who left West Germany and returned to Turkey were children and teenagers under eighteen years of age.⁷ Numbering at over half a million, they either returned with their parents or, like many “suitcase children” (Kofferkinder), were sent to live with grandparents or relatives. Just like the number of returning guest workers, the annual number of children returning to Turkey peaked in 1984, since guest workers who accepted the West German government’s 10,500 DM remigration premium had to take their spouses and dependents with them, receiving an extra 1,500 DM per underage child. Although guest workers who took the early social security contributions were not beholden to this regulation, they typically returned with their entire families.

Just as there was no singular “second generation,” so too was there no singular experience for children who returned as part of the mass exodus of 1984. Their experiences differed based on their age and gender, the country in which they were born or spent most of their lives, and whether they returned to cities or villages (Figure 6.1). While these differences shaped the children’s attitudes toward and experiences of return migration, both countries’ governments and media tended to homogenize them and to perpetuate the stereotype that the children were both threats and victims in need of assistance. The Turkish government, having opposed return migration and done nothing to assist children who had returned in the previous decade, now scrambled to deal with this “threat” head-on. For the Education Ministry, the challenge was clear: reintegrating this unwanted mass of Germanized children would require re-Turkifying them – turning them back into Turks.

More than their parents’ struggles with unemployment and racism, the experiences of the children and teenagers who returned in 1984 called into question the already contested “voluntariness” of the remigration law. The vast majority of these so-called “return children” had little to no say in the decision and, in many cases, felt that their parents had forced them to return against their own will. This sense of an involuntary return was captured in a prominent 1984–1986 sociological survey of returning children and teenagers of all guest worker nationalities who had been born in West Germany or spent most of their lives there. Approximately one-quarter had wished to return to Turkey, while two-thirds reported that they had been “required” to return with their families or had “not opposed” their families’ desire to return.⁸ While only two percent of respondents used the term “forced” explicitly, the West German media sensationalized the idea of a forced return and portrayed the children as victims of their parents’ decisions. Such rhetoric downplayed West Germans’ complicity in kicking out the Turks by deflecting guilt onto migrant parents for having forcibly removed or even “uprooted” their children.

For many children and teenagers, the prospect of returning to Turkey was connected not only to everyday concerns about their families, social lives, and schools, but also rooted in fundamental questions of identity: where did they feel most comfortable, and which country did they consider “home”? Those who had grown up in Turkey and had migrated at an older age to Germany sometimes considered Turkey their home and looked forward to returning. In a 2014 interview, Meliha K., who migrated to Germany as a teenager, recalled having been ecstatic when her parents decided to return to Turkey. “I hated it! I just hated it!” she exclaimed repeatedly about her life in Germany as her parents, also at the interview, erupted in laughter. “I don’t even understand how they lived there!” she exclaimed.⁹ Günnür, who grew up in Ankara with her grandparents, also expressed her “antipathy” toward Germany.¹⁰ When her parents forced her to join them in Germany upon her grandparents’ death, she even went on a hunger strike. For Günnür, the problems stemmed not only from her difficulties speaking German and getting used to a new country but also from her confrontation with “village Turks,” whom she encountered for the very first time in West Germany and against whom she harbored prejudices. “I am not a village girl, I was born in Ankara!” she complained, noting that her only friends were German. After years of isolation due to her inability to interact with Turks “like her” from the cities, Günnür was delighted to return to Ankara in the 1980s.

The experience of leaving West Germany was generally more difficult for children and teenagers who had been born and raised primarily abroad. Many of them considered West Germany “home” and mourned their return to Turkey. “It was the most bitter day of my life,” one girl sobbed, “as I had to separate myself from my friends and from the country in which I was born and raised and that I loved as my homeland.”¹¹ Erci E., who migrated to Berlin at age four, explained the distinction: “Germany is my homeland (Heimat), but my country of origin (Herkunftsland) is Turkey.”¹² This notion of a “country of origin” or, literally translated, “heritage land,” reflected a nostalgia for her parents’ past rather than her own individual rootedness within it. By contrast, many viewed Turkey as a “vacation country,” which had inadvertently reinforced their sense of cultural estrangement. Subject to the watchful eye of the “gossip-addicted” villagers, who chastised her for not wearing a headscarf, another girl “noticed each year more clearly how much she had already become a ‘German’ in the eyes of her countrymen.”¹³

Long derided in Turkey as “Germanized” and suffering from cultural estrangement, the returning children and teenagers struggled with experiences that were as much public as personal. Amid the mass exodus of 1984, Turkish references to “Almancı children” became more frequent and disdainful, often mocking their perceived Europeanization and even Americanization (Figure 6.3). That year, production began on the satirical film Katma Değer Şaban (Value Added Şaban), starring comedic actor Kemal Sunal as a teenager named Şaban who returns to Turkey after spending his childhood with relatives in West Germany.¹⁴ Immediately, the audience sees Şaban as an object of ridicule. He arrives at the Istanbul airport sporting an outlandish outfit influenced by the 1980s punk music scene – an uncommon sight in Turkey at the time, despite the subculture’s popularity in the United States and Europe. His hair is partially shaved and dyed in splotches of green, blue, and purple. He sports a flashy red turtleneck, tight black leather pants, knee-high boots, a metal-studded vest, a gold earring, and a Mercedes-Benz logo on a gold chain around his neck. When greeting his father, he pulls out a guitar adorned with stickers of rock bands and sings an improvised rock song whose lyrics are a mixture of German, French, and Turkish. “Hallo Papa! Bonjour Papa!” he belts, before switching to poorly accented Turkish. Neighbors’ disdainful glances and explicit criticism of him as an Almancı turn his estrangement into a joke.¹⁵

Figure 6.3 Turkish teenagers in denim pants, mocked as “Almancı children” in their home country, mid-1980s. Behind them are posters expressing their interest in American and European popular culture: Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca (1942), Gary Cooper in the western classic High Noon (1952), the American horror film Tarantula (1955), the Bruce Lee film Fist of Fury (1972), Freddie Mercury performing in Queen’s 1977 world tour, Miss Piggy from The Muppet Movie (1979), and the German Eurodisco pop band Dschinghis Khan, which won fourth place at the 1979 Eurovision song contest.

© akg-images/Guenay Ulutuncok, used with permission.

This sense of cultural estrangement was not only a social but also a political problem, particularly in the realm of public education. Schools, in Sarah Thomsen Vierra’s words, were the primary institutional sites where Turkish children “began to learn what it meant to be German,” as they interacted on a daily basis with West German teachers, classmates, and state curricula.¹⁶ As Brittany Lehman has shown, migrants’ home countries also intervened to varying degrees in their education, often leading to transnational tensions.¹⁷ Brian Van Wyck has traced this involvement to 1972, when, in cooperation with the West German state governments, Turkey began implementing preparatory classes taught by Turkish teachers sent from Turkey.¹⁸ Because guest workers were still understood as temporary residents at the time, these courses aimed less at integrating students into West Germany and more at preparing them to reintegrate into Turkey. With great leeway to develop their own lessons, teachers sent from Turkey generally highlighted the Turkish language, geography, history, and culture, and decorated their classrooms with nationalistic symbols such as Turkish flags and Atatürk portraits. Quickly, however, the teachers realized that replicating the content and pedagogy of Turkish classrooms did not work well with migrant students, who spent most of their day with German teachers. In explaining the pedagogical differences, observers noted that the disciplinary practices, rote memorization, and lecturing that prevailed in Turkish classrooms contrasted with West German teachers’ interactive and student-centered pedagogy.

By the late 1970s, however, West German officials lamented that efforts to prepare guest workers’ children for their return to Turkey were failing. The Foreign Office was particularly alarmed by a 1977 sociological survey conducted in Izmir that interviewed Turkish teachers about their experiences teaching middle school students who had returned from West Germany. Overwhelmingly, the teachers complained that the students “destroy classroom dynamics” by making rude remarks and forgetting to bring their books.¹⁹ The problems were most apparent in German foreign language courses, where returning students allegedly acted like “little know-it-alls” and flaunted their near-native mastery of the language in the faces of their Turkish teachers, many of whom had never been to a German-speaking country.²⁰ Classroom conflicts were compounded by fundamental differences in the two countries’ public education structures. The Turkish government’s requirement that children graduate from a Turkish elementary school before being permitted to attend middle school (orta okul) meant that children returning with insufficient Turkish language skills were frequently held back for as long as three years.²¹

One way to avoid the language barrier was to attend an elite private or special public school with German as a partial language of instruction. The most prestigious was the German High School (Alman Lisesi), a private secondary school in Istanbul’s wealthy district of Beyoğlu founded in 1868 to educate the children of German merchants, diplomats, missionaries, and cultural figures living in the cosmopolitan Ottoman city.²² Located just three miles away was the public Istanbul High School (Erkek Lisesi), which received substantial financial and administrative support from the West German government and had taught mathematics and science courses in German since the 1910s. The latter was one option among the Turkish government’s slate of elite merit-based Anatolian High Schools (Anadolu Lisesi) that, despite their name, were located in major Turkish cities. Yet West German officials knew that such schools, with a capacity of only 1,000 students each and with a notoriously rigorous nationwide admissions exam, could not accommodate a large influx of returning students.²³ The schools’ location in a few select cities also meant that children who returned elsewhere – particularly, as most did, to villages and small towns – would remain unserved.

Motivated by these concerns, in November 1977 the West German Foreign Office reached out to the embassies of all guest workers’ home countries to ask about any projects currently in place for facilitating the reintegration of guest worker families and offering bilateral cooperation on the matter.²⁴ Several countries already had projects underway. Greece had made the most progress, with a designated Reintegration Center for Migrant Workers with branches in both Athens and Thessaloniki set to open a few months later.²⁵ Although the Greek Reintegration Center was not government operated (it was funded primarily by the Greek Orthodox Church in cooperation with the Protestant Church of Germany), it was a solid step toward studying the problems of return migrants and offering them legal and practical advice. The West German Foreign Office also touted its financial support for the Association for Greek-German Education in Athens. The association planned to implement a pilot project in a small local private school attended primarily by returning guest worker children and children from Greek-German mixed marriages, which would supplement the regular curriculum with German lessons.²⁶

The Turkish government, however, could not name a single organization, governmental or otherwise, that aided returning workers and their children. Turkish officials’ disinterest in assisting returning guest worker families was consistent with their concurrent lack of cooperation with West Germany’s proposals for facilitating the economic and professional reintegration of returning guest workers, owing to their financially based opposition to return migration. West German diplomats complained about a similar nonchalance in discussions of the educational reintegration of migrant children. According to one West German internal memorandum, Turkish embassy officials could provide no “reliable” information about the number of “returning children,” and a follow-up conversation at the Education Ministry revealed that “they do not even see it as a problem.”²⁷ To the West German government’s dismay, Turkish education officials had also rejected a proposal by the prestigious Istanbul High School, which envisioned an admissions process that ranked returning children according to their success within the West German education system. Turkish officials balked at the suggestion and, as a result, only seventeen of the ninety-three returning children and teenagers who had applied in the previous months were accepted, even though in most cases their knowledge of the language was “more than sufficient.”²⁸

The West German government also encountered difficulties in its quest to send German teachers to educate return migrants in Turkey’s German-language schools, a plan that both countries’ education ministries had been discussing since the mid-1970s. Although both sides had agreed to the sending of two German teachers to the Anatolian High School in Izmir for the 1979/1980 school year, the Turkish government’s “strict adherence” to the extensive review of visa application and work permit materials had made the process “exceedingly difficult” and even “impracticable.” Even though the West German government had sent the required documents six months ahead of the start of the school year, the teachers’ work and residence permits had not been granted by mid-summer. Because of the uncertainty, the West German state authorities gave up on the idea and placed the two teachers in West German schools.²⁹

The Turkish government’s unwillingness to develop programs for reintegrating migrant children reflected the overall shift of the late 1970s, when officials sought to prevent the guest workers’ return for economic reasons. As Turkey’s economic crisis worsened and as both countries realized that guest workers were deciding not to return to Turkey, the goal of preparing the students for their return and reintegration receded. As West German Foreign Office officials concluded, “The Turkish government, which until recently had demanded that equal emphasis be placed on the integration of Turkish children into the German school system and on their simultaneous preparation for the smoothest possible reintegration [in Turkey], is now increasingly focusing on the desire for integration.”³⁰ Just as in the case of guest workers’ professional reintegration, the Turkish government came under fire again for its unwillingness to assist the children. In 1978, Cumhuriyet complained that the Turkish government was only interested in the guest workers’ remittances and therefore had abandoned the children, who were “heartbroken,” unable to speak either language, and mistreated as the “stepchildren of Germany.”³¹

With the September 12, 1980, military coup, the new Turkish government intensified its efforts to influence the education of Turkish children abroad, particularly in the realm of religion. This emphasis reflected the military government’s broader strategy of achieving unity and stifling left-wing and Kurdish dissidents by reframing national identity in terms of Turkish ethnicity and Sunni Islam. Reflecting this “Turkish-Islamic Synthesis,” as the government called it, religious education became part of the public school curriculum, with an exclusive emphasis on Sunni Islam and on portraying “patriotism and love of parents, the state, and army” as a “religious duty.”³² The coup also ushered in a heightened interest in influencing Turkish citizens abroad, whom – with the exception of leftists, dissidents, and ethnic minorities – the military government considered part of the national community. This commitment was codified in the 1982 constitution, which for the first time pledged the state’s responsibility to “ensure family unity, the education of the children, the cultural needs, and the social security of Turkish citizens working abroad” and, crucially, to “safeguard their ties with the home country and to help them return home.”³³ Although the government blatantly contradicted this pledge by continuing to oppose guest workers’ return migration, its political interest in maintaining their connection to Turkey remained strong.

The Turkish government’s new prerogative, besides attempting to oust leftist Turkish teachers from their jobs at guest worker children’s preparatory schools, was to promote religious education in West Germany through Koran schools. As Brian Van Wyck has explained, Koran schools in West Germany initially existed relatively independently with little influence from Turkey’s secular-oriented government and were organized by Turkish religious groups such as the Süleymancı and Islamist political parties such as the National Salvation Party (Millî Selâmet Partisi, MSP) and far-right MHP.³⁴ During the late 1970s, as Europeans increasingly viewed Islam as an impediment to guest workers’ integration, West Germans began condemning Koran schools as promoting far-right Turkish nationalist ideologies, harboring ties to the MHP’s paramilitary Grey Wolves, and abusing their students through corporal punishment. Yet, after the coup, the Turkish government viewed Koran schools as venues for exporting the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis and politically influencing the diaspora. Supported by the West German government, which welcomed the intervention to regulate Islam, Turkey sent state-supported Muslim religious leaders (imams) to West Germany to lead prayers at mosques and teach at Koran schools.³⁵

But amid the mass exodus following the 1983 remigration law, as tens of thousands of “Germanized” children and teenagers were poised to return to Turkey for the 1984/1985 school year, the Turkish government was confronted with the reality that manipulating their education in West Germany was not enough. After years of doing virtually nothing to assist them, officials in Ankara now grappled with a question that struck at the core of the postcoup conception of national identity: How, after excessively integrating into Germany, could this “lost generation” of Almancı children – stereotyped as speaking insufficient Turkish, having little knowledge of Turkish culture, and abandoning their Muslim faith – be re-integrated into Turkey? Based on previous reports, the Turkish government knew that the children could not simply be dropped into regular classes. Instead, before they were ready to join regular classes, the children desperately needed an orientation to life in Turkey – better considered as a crash course in re-Turkification. During the summer of 1984, education officials scrambled to implement what they called “integration courses” (uyum kursları), intensive six-week summer programs for the children of returning guest workers that aimed to prepare them for Turkish schools. Though framed primarily as language classes, the courses had an ulterior motive: teaching Germanized children how to be “real Turks.”

Ideologically charged, the integration courses’ government-mandated curriculum reflected the postcoup conception of a singular national identity that was tied to Turkish ethnicity and Sunni Islam and that villainized subversive outsiders. In his analysis of the special textbook used in these courses, Brian J. K. Miller has emphasized that the Education Ministry explicitly expressed its commitment to assisting the children’s reintegration into the “genuine culture of the motherland.”³⁶ Glorifying Kemalism and the foundation of the Turkish Republic, the textbook began with the lyrics of the Independence March (İstiklal Marşı) and featured excerpts from nationalistic poetry and the famous speeches of Atatürk. Amid the coup government’s emphasis on militarism, patriotic lessons on Ottoman and Turkish history were sometimes accompanied by lectures on contemporary “national security” in which, as one student recalled, they were required to memorize “the different ranks of the army and the external and internal enemies of Turkey, who were many.”³⁷ Departing from the secular orientation of Kemalism, students also received religious education similar to that in Turkish public schools at the time. The courses also placed great emphasis on imparting cultural norms. As Murad B., a self-proclaimed “suitcase child” recalled, “They were teaching us not only the history of Turkey and rules in Turkey but also how you have to appear in Turkey, how you have to behave in Turkey, and that that is different from how you have to act in Germany.” Most vividly, he was taught to “stand up and kiss the hand of elders” when entering their presence.³⁸

Given the Turkish public’s longstanding curiosity about “Almancı children” and the fates of return migrants, the integration courses drew widespread media coverage. In August 1984, the Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet published two front-page, above-the-fold articles on the subject, one week apart (Figure 6.4). With forlorn photographs and quotations from returning students, the articles aimed to attract sympathy. In one article, fourteen-year-old Nuri wondered: “Am I a Turk or a German? I can read neither there nor here … Who will accept me?” Seventeen-year-old Erkan, who had been living in Germany since the age of four, felt self-conscious because everyone was staring at his blue jeans, long hair, and Converse shoes. Sixteen-year-old Oya complained that she and others had been held back for several years. “We are adults, but we are in the same class as small children,” she said. “Everyone makes fun of me.”³⁹ The second article attributed these difficulties to their general confusion about life in Turkey, with children rattling off lists of what they sensed as cultural differences: why people honked their car horns so frequently, why the toys broke so easily, why civil servants treated people so unkindly, why the television was so awful, why the Bay of Izmir was so polluted, why no one did their job properly and honestly, and why everyone gave commands without saying “please.” After each student’s quotation, the newspaper editorialized by printing the phrase “I am confused” (şaşırdım). The message was clear: “Germany did not adapt to their parents. Or their parents did not adapt to the Germans. Now they are to be adapted to us … For now, ‘They’re Not Adapting at All.’”⁴⁰

Figure 6.4 Front-page Cumhuriyet article on the struggles of “return children” in the Turkish government’s integration courses, August 14, 1984. The headline states: “They Grew up in Another Country and Made their ‘Final’ Return, Now … They Will Adapt to Us.”

© Cumhuriyet, used with permission.

Discussions of the integration courses also reinforced virulent stereotypes that villainized returning students. In an interview with Milliyet, a Turkish teacher who taught one of the integration courses berated them as “rude children without morals and without nationalities.” The problem, he insisted, was not insufficient integration into Germany but rather excessive integration. “They learned the German language like parrots in German schools. They learned their way of life like apes. And now they show up in front of us, scrunch their noses at everything, and look down on us and the ‘native’ peers of their age.”⁴¹ He placed the blame on the structural discrimination the students faced in West Germany, their internal identity conflict, and their parents’ decisions to return against their will. But he did not end there – he also placed the blame, fundamentally, on the children themselves. Statements blaming the children for the problems of reintegration were even more powerful because they came from respected civil servants, including teachers and principals, who had firsthand insight into the children’s classroom behavior. Moving beyond the echo chamber of rumors into the hallowed halls of the schoolgrounds, negative stereotypes about returning students assumed an air of legitimacy, making the children’s sense of cultural estrangement more potent than ever before.

Overwhelmingly, however, the integration courses failed to accomplish their goals. Conceived and implemented at the last minute, despite ample warning about the imminent mass remigration, the courses were marred by organizational problems. During the first summer that the courses were offered, there were not enough spaces to accommodate the number of interested students. Located primarily in cities, the courses reinforced urban elitism at the expense of serving children who returned to the countryside. Although the programs continued the following summers, attendance dropped. In 1986, only 417 students participated in the courses, which were held in thirteen of the country’s fifty-four provinces. The decrease was attributable not only to the declining number of returning children but also to a lack of interest.⁴² Even after attending the courses, only 43 percent of surveyed students described them as “useful,” and Murad B. had completely forgotten about his integration course until asked about it in a 2016 interview.⁴³ Resolving the challenge of “reintegrating” “Germanized” children into Turkish schools and society required much more than a top-down, government-sponsored, six-week crash course in what it meant to be Turkish. As Cumhuriyet put it, “It looks like the battle to ‘reintegrate’ children from other countries and other cultures, where we expect them to fit in with us, will take much longer than we thought.”⁴⁴

Liberal Children in Authoritarian Schools

The failure of the integration courses set up returning children and teenagers for a difficult transition to the 1984/1985 school year and beyond. In the ubiquitous news reports from both West Germany and Turkey, one theme remains constant throughout the 1980s: the contrast between the “authoritarian” school system of Turkey and the “free” and “democratic” school system of West Germany. This binary became the focal point of West German media coverage of the struggles of remigrant children because it reinforced West German beliefs about a seemingly “backward” and “authoritarian” Turkish way of life, ideas that had already intensified following Turkey’s 1980 military coup. When applied to the education of returning children, the liberal-authoritarian binary revealed a paradox in Germans’ attitudes toward Turkish migrants. On the one hand, the general emphasis on Turkish authoritarianism underscored the core belief that the migrants were incapable of integrating into West Germany and therefore should continue to return to their home country. On the other hand, by portraying the children’s reintegration difficulties as the result of their education in a “liberal” German milieu, it exposed the possibility that Turkish children, more so than their parents, might be considered German.

In the context of return children’s education, the liberal-authoritarian binary was fundamentally rooted in an essentialist interpretation of the two countries’ different approaches to pedagogy that was amplified following the 1980 military coup. Since the implementation of preparatory courses for Turkish students in West Germany in the 1970s, West German pedagogues had presented the two school systems as incompatible: West Germany’s preference for student-centered and discussion-based learning allegedly clashed with Turkish teachers’ lecturing and emphasis on rote memorization. Criticism of the Koran schools, though mostly detached from the state and taught by religious educators, reinforced the notion that even secular public education in Turkey emphasized discipline and rigidity to the students’ detriment. The role of education in delineating the sense of cultural difference increased following the 1980 military coup and Europe-wide criticism of Turkey’s slow return to democracy. For West German critics of Turkey, the authoritarian classroom went hand in hand with the authoritarian government. While these binaries were largely media discourses in both countries, they were also prominent in the recollections of the return migrant students themselves, of Turkish teachers and principals, and of those West German teachers who were sent to Turkey to assist in educating returning migrant students.

Following Turkey’s military coup and crackdown on leftists, West German observers harped on the idea that those returning to Turkey, especially migrant youths, were feared by both civil servants and the military as “potential agitators” or “revolutionaries.”⁴⁵ Their education in a “liberal” and “freer” education system would make them prone to ask questions critical of the government, behave improperly, and ultimately rub off on other Turkish students. This discourse was not invented by West German observers but was rather grounded in quotations from Turkish teachers and principals who complained about the students’ lax behavior, lack of discipline, and irreverence. One school director paraphrased in a news report expressed concerns that remigrant children would “shake up schools’ sacred framework of drilling and subordination” because West Germany’s “freer” education system had socialized them to express “criticism and dissent.”⁴⁶ The principal of the İnönü High School in Izmir expressed his difficulties remaining patient when dealing with returning children, who had a lax attitude toward authority figures. “I was walking through the hall, and a girl from Germany came up to talk to me. She linked arms with me and started chatting as if it were nothing. Most of them never say ‘my teacher’ (hocam). We must teach them how one speaks to a teacher. They call the teachers ‘uncle’ (amca).”⁴⁷

In both West German and Turkish news outlets, the figure of the school principal embodied these power dynamics. Equating having been raised abroad with a disease that only a proper Turkish education could cure, one school principal reportedly told the students on the first day of school: “You are from a foreign land. I will make you healthy again.”⁴⁸ In another article, Cumhuriyet reported on the students’ first encounter with the principal of a residential school near Ankara. As the students fooled around during his speech, the principal rattled off a list of restrictions: “There is nothing forbidden here, but there are rules. You are not to exit the dormitories. I am not saying that you may not stroll along the roads and parks, but there will be surveillance and supervision.” The principal emphasized clothing restrictions along gendered lines. “I do not want students wearing blue jeans and going without neckties … Female students will also wear clothing appropriate for students and will be dressed modestly … Say goodbye to your parents. Hand over your earrings and jewelry to them. Straighten up your uniforms. Separate the male and female students.” The students’ immediate reaction reveals their negative impressions of their new schools. “This much discipline is not necessary at all,” a teenage boy named Murat scoffed.⁴⁹

The restrictions on clothing and accessories were among the most controversial, with students complaining that the uniforms stifled their identities. At the time, Turkish public schools required uniforms: girls wore skirts or dresses with done-up hair and no makeup or jewelry, and boys wore suit jackets, neckties, and had very short haircuts. But, as reflected in the cinematic caricature of the Almancı named Şaban as a punk rocker, many teenage boys had grown their hair out long past their chins or shoulders or had pierced one of their earlobes. That was true of Hüseyin, who returned to Turkey from Würzburg in 1984. Despite expressing his punk rock personality aesthetically with long hair, jeans, a military-style jacket, and an earring, Hüseyin was forced to take out his earring to conform to his Turkish school’s dress code. As Die Tageszeitung put it mournfully, “Today, the small hole in his ear remains a reminder of his past.”⁵⁰

While clothing restrictions were the most visible manifestation of control, much of the controversy surrounding the liberal-authoritarian binary centered on classroom dynamics, particularly the student–teacher relationship. West German teachers sent to Turkey to teach returning children articulated the binary most explicitly. In Turkey, complained one German teacher in Istanbul, students’ role required “passively listening to the teaching authority and diligently writing down everything said, learning the content more or less unreflectively by heart, repeating it back as close to verbatim as possible in the exams, neither scrutinizing nor analyzing nor criticizing it, copying down pages from books – whether understood or not – nonetheless presenting it all proudly as accessible facts.” It was clear, she concluded, that “many years of attending a German school can disrupt the usual attitude towards learning in Turkey.”⁵¹ After spending the 1985/1986 school year at Istanbul’s Üsküdar Anatolian High School, another teacher explained that he had needed to adapt his otherwise “liberal” teaching style. “Even I became authoritarian at this school,” he admitted, calling the school “fundamentally a ghetto”: “It would have been impossible to accomplish anything without disciplinary measures. This school system would never function if all were authoritarian and only one was liberal.”⁵² Another German teacher, about to depart for a year in Turkey, worried whether he would be compatible with Turkish schools and feared aggravating his Turkish colleagues. “I do not want to change my teaching style,” he said, “but I also do not want to cause conflicts. I want to do everything to avoid provoking the Turkish side.”⁵³

The notion that Turkish teachers were harsh disciplinarians whereas German teachers were friendly and “liberal” was also common in West German media accounts of the time. A Der Spiegel article published at the beginning of the 1984/1985 school year, which recounted young return migrants’ nostalgia for their German schools and their regrets about returning to Turkey, was tellingly titled “My German Teachers Loved Me.”⁵⁴ Yet the West German media’s emphasis on the idea that German teachers “loved” their students was an overly rosy portrayal that failed to address far more rampant accounts of tensions and abuse experienced by Turkish students in German classrooms. In a short 1980 poem, a fourteen-year-old Turkish boy named Mehmet, who had only spent four years in Germany, complained that his German classmates called him cruel names, such as “camel jockey,” “garlic eater,” and “stinker.”⁵⁵ A sixteen-year-old girl named Nalan complained that her peers even tried to insult her by calling her “Atatürk” and were only nice to her – “for a very short time!” – when she would bring chips and candy to share with them.⁵⁶ In many cases, teachers did not stand up on the Turkish students’ behalf. Yet, by focusing on the positive rather than the negative, West German news outlets could strengthen their arguments condemning Turkish schools to reinforce exclusionary tropes about Turks in general.

Those sympathetic to returning students also assailed the public-school curriculum for reinforcing Turkish nationalism. Die Tageszeitung remarked that, compared with the cautiously muted nationalist spirit of post-fascist West Germany, the requirement to sing the Turkish national anthem at the beginning of lessons was “incomprehensible” to many students and quoted one student who dismissed Turkish schools as “total shit.”⁵⁷ The greatest disconnects occurred in history and geography courses, which touted the accomplishments of Atatürk alongside the centuries-old tales of Turkish military triumph. One student complained, “In history class, we are told only about Turkey. They portray Turkey as a country without negative aspects, as a country that lives in prosperity and affluence. I have had history classes for three years and we have only talked about Atatürk and his reforms. But we also have to know about the rest of the world!”⁵⁸ The Turkish journalist Baha Güngör, who regularly contributed to West German newspapers, concurred: “These young people do not want to know how the Turks won the Battle of Malazgırt in 1071 and why this battle should be so meaningful for Turkey today. They want to know why there is inflation, why Turkish democracy lags so far behind that in Western European states, and why Turkey is so harshly criticized by Europe in questions of human rights.”⁵⁹

Returning students themselves complained that attempts to deconstruct nationalistic narratives, ask critical questions, and discuss or debate the lecture material were shut down. Alongside the liberal-authoritarian binary, they also invoked the language of democracy and modernity. A teenage boy interviewed for a Turkish newspaper praised the more “democratic” environment that he had experienced in West Germany, where he was allowed to raise his hand, participate, and “contradict” the teachers (Figure 6.5). “Discussion is the foundation of democracy,” he insisted. “One cannot educate through orders. One must persuade.”⁶⁰ Another boy from Nuremberg called his experience at Turkish schools “a type of slavery” and complained that the Turkish education system was “not modern.” “If I want to have a modern education,” he quipped, “I have to go to Germany.” An eighteen-year-old at the private Ortadoğu Lisesi described his school days as psychological torment that was “brainwash[ing]” him into obedience: “All nerves are under pressure … To be able to survive here, one must not speak, not see anything, and of course not hear anything.”⁶¹ A German teacher who worked with returning children connected this stifling of discussion to the question of Turkey’s status as a democracy following the military coup: “The Turks must learn to handle criticism if they want to be a democratic state.”⁶² Most egregiously, several students flipped the script on Nazi analogies by comparing Turkish teachers to Hitler.

Figure 6.5 Reflecting return migrants’ praise of West Germany’s “democratic” teaching style versus the “authoritarian” education in Turkey, Turkish children in a West German preparatory school eagerly raise their hands, 1980.

© picture alliance/dpa, used with permission.

The strongest critiques, however, targeted Turkish teachers’ verbal and physical abuse of their students. Halit, a ten-year-old boy whose family came from Fetiya on the Aegean coast, explained the disciplinary differences in Turkey. “The teachers don’t know how to treat people,” he complained. “If you don’t pay attention to something, if you just fool around during the lesson, you’ll just get slapped a couple times.” In Germany, on the other hand, “the teachers would just glare at us and then we were all silent as fish.”⁶³ Ayşe, who attended Maltepe Lisesi, revealed that she was “still very afraid of the teachers,” who had often hit her.⁶⁴ Her schoolmate, Ayhan, corroborated her claim: “In Germany, we were always warned: ‘Be careful, when you’re in Turkey, they will make real Turks out of you.’” His fears materialized one day during a geography class. When he could not identify the name of a Turkish city, his teacher slapped him in the face as part of an apparent pedagogical technique: the name of the city, Tokat, means “slap.”⁶⁵ In another article, a Turkish teacher exposed the abuse committed by her own colleagues.⁶⁶ A fellow teacher had publicly shamed a remigrant student as a “beast” for chewing gum during class. When the student responded by calling him a “pig” in German, which required translation by another remigrant, the teacher slapped him and kicked him out of the classroom. Although the teacher had escalated the incident, the disciplinary committee blamed the student.

Often it was not only teachers but also classmates who viewed the returning children disparagingly, reiterating tropes about the migrant children’s excessive freedom and lack of discipline. Directly labeling his peers as Almancı, a student at Istanbul’s Üsküdar Anatolian High School explained matter-of-factly: “They are freer than we are, and their language is ill-mannered and rude. They just have not experienced sufficient care from their parents.”⁶⁷ Many remigrant children found themselves once again subject to their peers’ cruel name-calling – this time, however, from their Turkish classmates. A girl named Yeşim recalled times at which her Turkish classmates had called her a “Nazi.”⁶⁸ Halil, a middle-school-aged boy who had grown up in Hamburg, was taunted as a non-Muslim infidel (gâvur) for having eaten pork in Germany, even though he promised that he never had.⁶⁹ The ostracization from classmates meant that returning children often tended to congregate together and speak German among one another.

Outside school, the children faced similar difficulties that further reinforced preexisting stereotypes about Turkish culture as authoritarian and patriarchal. Reflecting ongoing West German narratives of Turkish women’s victimization at the hands of their patriarchal husbands and fathers, reports on remigrant children drew distinctions based on gender and highlighted the struggles of teenage girls. A 1985 Die Tageszeitung article reported that Turkish newspapers’ frequent criticism of the girls’ allegedly loose morals and sexual promiscuity had affected their daily interactions with men in their home country.⁷⁰ Men of all ages, the article stated, “hit on the remigrant girls in order to go to bed with them.”⁷¹ Migrant girls’ styles of dress and their refusal to wear headscarves also raised eyebrows within local communities. In one of Gülten Dayıoğlu’s short stories about returnees, a middle-school girl named Yahya becomes the target of local gossip. “Why are her pants so short and tight around her bottom? People would even be embarrassed to wear that as underwear!” the neighbors complain. The gossip takes an emotional toll on Yahya. “I am like a prisoner in the village,” she explains. “When I go outside, everyone looks at me. There is nowhere to go, no friends. I am going crazy trapped at home.”⁷²

Many girls encountered harsher restrictions in Turkey since their parents wished to respect local gender norms and fit in among their neighbors. When speaking to journalists about life in their parents’ homeland, they often invoked the language of “freedom.” Derya Emgin, whose family remigrated from Heidelberg, recalled feeling very “aggressive” toward her parents. “I did not want the boys on the street to think of me as an ‘easy girl,’” she explained, and “I complained to my parents that I could have had a freer life in Germany.”⁷³ Zemre B. reported a similar experience: “In Germany, I played volleyball very often, and we would go to the disco at night. Here I can’t be seen with a boy at all and, if I were, all hell would break loose.”⁷⁴ Though less commonly reported, some girls experienced new freedom of mobility. Hülya, who grew up in Siegen and accompanied her parents to Gelibolu at age fifteen, quickly realized what was not permissible, such as “smoking inside a store or smoking outside in front of my parents or kissing a guy.” But Hülya’s parents did permit her to go to Turkish discos, a privilege denied to her in West Germany. She attributed the shift to her parents’ belief that their home country’s gender relations, specifically the pressures placed on Turkish men, would prevent them from making a move on her. “Here everyone knows that the girls have to be virgins. If they were to sleep with a girl, they would have to marry her immediately. So, they’re sort of afraid.”⁷⁵

Alarmed by the rise in media attention to the problems of remigrant children, some Germans traveled to Turkey to observe the situation firsthand. In 1986, a group of social workers based in North Rhine-Westphalia went on an expedition to Turkey to report on the experiences of remigrant children and compiled their diary entries and findings in a report aptly titled Almancılar – Deutschländer. The social workers expressed great sympathy. A woman named Anja described an encounter in Zonguldak with a teenager named Hasan, an only child who had lived in Germany from 1976 to 1984 and had returned, in his words, because he “did not wish to destroy his good relationship with his parents by marrying a German.” Although he soon regretted the decision, he could not return to Germany even as a visitor due to harsh visa restrictions. “His life is destroyed,” Anja wrote. “It was another one those depressing experiences that made me feel powerless and sad.”⁷⁶ The impression of the students’ treatment in Turkey was even worse for Monika Joseph, a German teacher who likewise traveled there that year as part of a three-week study trip with a group of her colleagues.⁷⁷ While she was initially excited to learn about the home country of her Turkish students, her observations made her “less tolerant than before,” since they reinforced her disdain for the poverty and religious conservatism of the countryside. A village near Hatusha, she complained, did not even have a chalkboard, and she had a “not so nice” conversation with a local religious teacher (hoca). Most appalling to her were the regulations of a school in the Central Anatolian province of Kayseri, where female students allegedly received a fine or even a short prison sentence for removing their headscarves.

Following widespread reports of the children’s difficulties, local-level initiatives began cropping up to ameliorate their plight. In 1987, Canan Kahraman, who had spent fifteen years in West Germany, founded the Istanbul-based Culture and Assistance Association for the Children of Remigrants (Kultur- und Hilfsverein für die Kinder von Remigranten). Her motivation to found the organization stemmed from the “depressive phase” that she had endured when returning to Turkey in 1975. “It was a difficult time for me,” she admitted. “No one was there to show me the way, which would have helped me very much. I at least needed someone to whom I could have told my problems.” Kahraman envisioned the organization as a space for the children, teenagers, and young adults to candidly discuss their challenging experiences and to attend film screenings, museum exhibitions, concerts, seminars, and language courses.⁷⁸ Psychologists and therapists also developed programs for the children. The first was founded in 1989 as a cooperation between the German Culture Institute (Deutsche Kultur-Institut) in Istanbul and Ali Nahit Babaoğlu, director of the Bakırköy Psychiatric Hospital, who had spent fifteen years living and researching in West Germany. The goal was to create a space where local psychiatrists could meet individually with the children and, in rare cases, prescribe medication. The Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung praised the initiative for assisting children “who have found themselves psychologically in severe distress” and who “have until now surrendered to their mostly tragic fate and therefore have ended up at emotional dead ends.”⁷⁹

The Right to Return – Again – to Germany

With all the attention to the children’s problems, it came as no surprise that the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) chose to produce the low-budget 1990 feature film Sehnsucht (Yearning). A joint production by Turkish writer Kadir Sözen and German director Hanno Brühl, the fictional film follows the teenage Hüseyin and his younger brother Memo as they accompany their parents to a small town near Izmir after growing up in Cologne. Upon the brothers’ arrival, the townspeople treat them like outsiders. Hüseyin, who works at a small grocery store, endures the constant berating of his boss, and Memo has trouble at school. The teacher yells at him in front of the other students, complaining that he is “undisciplined” and “needs to learn respect.” Walking home from school and on the soccer field, the other students tease Memo, using the word Almancı. Relations within their nuclear and extended family are also strained. As a punishment for Memo’s poor grades and his inability to speak proper Turkish, their father sends the boys to pick cotton. Their uncle, who owns the cotton fields, screams at them for their apparently poor work ethic. “Did you learn that in Germany? Lazy twerps!” Ultimately, the brothers decide to run away, illegally cross the West German border, and reestablish their lives in Cologne.⁸⁰ Yet their plans are foiled by their lack of entry visas. Although the brothers had grown up in West Germany, the local Foreigner Office declares them illegal and orders them to return to Turkey.

Premiering at the First European Youth Film Festival in Antwerp and airing in the primetime Friday night slot on West German television, the film garnered further West German sympathy for the plight of remigrant children.⁸¹ In the words of one reviewer, it offered an “authentic” portrayal of the children’s “inner turmoil” as remigrant youths. “For many,” she wrote, “the country that most know only from stories and the annual vacation, becomes a nightmare.”⁸² The reviewer also noted that the film had a “pedagogical” function that stood to influence policy. The timing of the film’s production, the late 1980s, coincided with political debates about whether children who endured hardships after unwillingly returning to their parents’ homeland might one day be granted a “return option” (Wiederkehroption). This time, however, the return would mean going back to West Germany, the place they considered home.

The number of returning children who, like the fictional Hüseyin and Memo, yearned to return – again – to Germany was overwhelming. In a sociological survey of returning children between ages twelve and eighteen, nearly half the children said that they were “not satisfied at all” or “partly unsatisfied” with their return, that their lives in Germany had been “much better” or “somewhat better,” and that they would “definitely” or “very much like” to go back to Germany.⁸³ Evenly split by gender, these sentiments were especially strong among children who reported having been “forced” to return. Two-thirds cited “major school problems” due to both the language barrier and the school system itself. While this survey did not ask the students about their experiences outside school, their concerns about life in Turkey were multifaceted, involving their social lives, family conflicts, gender roles, and the overall feeling of being ostracized as Almancı. Missing their friends in Germany, with whom they now communicated only by letters or rare international telephone calls, played a major role.

For West German policymakers, a new question emerged: should these children be allowed to return to West Germany? Was there a moral or ethical imperative to alleviate the suffering of these children, whom the government had “kicked out” only a few years earlier and who considered Germany their homeland? These debates largely unfolded along party lines. Kohl’s CDU/CSU-FDP coalition, having expressly excluded a “return option” from the 1983 remigration law, ardently opposed allowing them to return. The SPD and Green Party, long more willing to express sympathy for the migrants, pushed for a return option in the late 1980s.

Discussions surrounding the return option emerged at the same time as some even more controversial debates about whether to grant migrants German citizenship. Germans’ longstanding and archaic racialized notion of citizenship, initially codified in 1913, perpetuated racism and social exclusion by legally classifying migrants as “foreigners.” Permitting them to become citizens, as the SPD and Green Party increasingly argued throughout the 1980s, would serve as an acknowledgment – at least on paper – that they had become part of German society. In 1981, however, the attempt by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and his SPD-FDP coalition to pass a law that would provide a path to citizenship for individuals born in Germany was silenced by the increasingly vocal call “Turks out!”⁸⁴ Reports on the plight of “Germanized” children who returned to Turkey reinvigorated the debate throughout the 1980s since they opened many Germans’ eyes to the reality that many children identified – and were externally identified in Turkey – as more “German” than “Turkish.” If the children were not able to reintegrate into their own home country, and if their own countrymen treated them so poorly, then where did they belong? Perhaps these children – and maybe even migrants as a whole – not only deserved to live in Germany but also to become German citizens.

These questions were on the Green Party’s mind in the spring of 1986, when the party’s parliamentary faction pressed Kohl’s government to articulate its opinion on permitting returned guest workers – and particularly their children – to move back to West Germany after difficulties “reintegrating.” Did Kohl’s government agree, the Green Party inquired, that West Germany had a “moral responsibility” toward children and teenagers who were either born in or “experienced most of their socialization” in West Germany? What “concrete measures” would the government take to “ease” their situation? Even more controversially, the Green Party asked whether the government would be willing to grant new residence permits for reentry in exceptional cases, such as when parents realized that their decision to return to Turkey was “significantly adversely affecting their children’s future development,” and if the parents were willing to repay the 10,500 DM premium and early social security reimbursement. The Green Party also proposed another exceptional situation that cast reentry into West Germany in a way that detached the children from their parents: could new residence permits be granted to children and teenagers who had spent most of their lives in West Germany, and who before age eighteen had been “forced to leave because of their parents’ decision,” but who wished to return to West Germany after reaching adulthood?⁸⁵

On all counts, Kohl’s government responded negatively and defensively, rejecting the notion that West Germany had a “moral responsibility” toward the children. At fault for their difficulties was not the 1983 remigration law, the government insisted, but rather their home countries’ dire economic problems. Though unwilling to admit that the returning children had integrated into West Germany, the government did acknowledge that they had been passively “affected by our cultural and social environment.” The overall impression was that the government had little interest in assisting the children. As for the controversial question of permitting returnees to reenter the country, the government refused. Even doing so on a case-by-case basis would “effectively result in an unlimited possibility for return.” Flippantly, the government reminded the parliamentarians that the 1983 law had established the infrastructure for advising guest workers before they decided to take the 10,500 DM premium. Parents, in this view, were to blame since they should have been forewarned about their children’s potential struggles.⁸⁶

The push for a return option did not subside, however, and became a hot-button issue in 1988. In March 1988, the SPD parliamentary faction introduced a Law for the Permission to Return for Foreigners Who Grew up in the Federal Republic. The draft law proposed the provision of unlimited residence permits for young foreigners who had completed their education in West Germany or had spent most of their lives there between the ages of ten and eighteen, as long as they applied for the residence permit within three years of their eighteenth birthday. To justify the law, the SPD contended that one-quarter of all returned foreigners were children and teenagers under age eighteen, who were dependent upon their parents’ decisions and had encountered “great difficulties reintegrating into the societal environment of their homeland.”⁸⁷ According to SPD member Gerd Wartenberg, the law fit squarely into West Germany’s integration policy and aimed to “help solve human difficulties and individual fates.”⁸⁸ Yet given the Social Democrats’ status as the opposition party, the proposed law found little traction.

Reforms quickly began at the state level, however. In May and June 1988, the State Interior Ministers of West Berlin and North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) began granting exceptions to young foreigners wishing to return to West Germany, and Hamburg and Rhineland-Palatinate followed suit.⁸⁹ Each state imposed its own guidelines. In West Berlin, for example, foreign children could only return if they wished to complete an educational or professional training program in the state and had submitted their application within three years of their departure from West Germany.⁹⁰ In justifying the reform, NRW Interior Minister Helmut Schnoor (SPD) cited “progressive” and “humane” concerns grounded in “a Christian conception of humanity.”⁹¹ Many of the children had suffered “tragic fates” and should be allowed to return if “Germany had become their actual homeland.”⁹² The Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger praised Schnoor’s move: “Whoever knows about the tragedies that are occurring in Turkish families who are willing to return or have already returned can only welcome that Interior Minister Schnoor has implemented a liberal rule for the young foreigners.”⁹³ The Kölnische Rundschau concurred, noting that “the Federal Republic has a human responsibility toward these young people.”⁹⁴

The tensions between the states’ reforms and the federal government’s obstinacy resulted in a surge in media coverage in the summer of 1988, with reports highlighting individual cases of Turkish teenagers and young adults who had been denied reentry into West Germany. The Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung reported on twenty-one-year-old Tahsin Baki, who had accompanied his parents to Turkey in 1984 following their acceptance of the 10,500 DM remigration premium.⁹⁵ The newspaper explained that his strong Ruhr accent and poor knowledge of Turkish made him an “outsider” in Turkey. Two years later, Baki had returned to his hometown of Gelsenkirchen with a tourist visa and attempted to apply for a residence permit. Despite written confirmation that he had secured an apprenticeship at a pet shop, the local Foreigner Office denied his request. An appeal to the NRW state government proved fruitless, confirming the assessment that Tahsin was in West Germany illegally and faced deportation if he did not return to Turkey voluntarily. After a yearlong battle, the state of NRW finally granted him a limited residence permit in the fall of 1987.⁹⁶ Another well-publicized case was that of Hakan Doğan, who was born in a small town near Bergisch-Gladbach, and who lived there until his family returned to Turkey when he was fifteen years old. Only after public protests and the powerful endorsement of a local government official in Cologne was he permitted to return to his West German hometown. As one headline put it, Doğan was just one of many “young Germans with Turkish names.”⁹⁷

Public opinion further shifted in 1988 with the revelation that several politicians in the governing coalition had changed their stance.⁹⁸ The most prominent was Liselotte Funcke (FDP), the Federal Commissioner for the Integration of Foreign Workers and their Families. Despite having earned the nicknames “Mother Liselotte” and “Angel of the Turks” for the “tolerance and understanding” that she showed toward guest worker families, Funcke had long toed the coalition line on the issue of a return option.⁹⁹ When she visited Istanbul’s Üsküdar Anatolian High School in the spring of 1986, several children had complained to her about their inability to return to West Germany. One boy questioned: “We lived in Germany for fourteen or fifteen years. We have friends and family there. But we cannot travel to Germany. Why?” Another lamented that he required a visa to spend his vacation in the country in which he had grown up and argued that Turkish citizens who had lived in West Germany should receive preferential treatment in immigration policy: “We’re not like the other normal Turks in Turkey. There have to be exceptions for us, right?” Funcke evaded the questions and defended the restrictive policy. Instead, she urged them to use their bilingualism as an “opportunity” and to come to terms with their situation as “migrants” in a globalizing world. “Living abroad is the fate of our time,” she asserted.¹⁰⁰

But with all the media coverage and studies of the children’s struggles, Funcke changed her position. In October 1988, she made headlines throughout the country when she implored Federal Interior Minister Friedrich Zimmermann (CSU) to include the return option in the ongoing revisions to the Foreigner Law (Ausländergesetz), which would go into effect in 1990. Strategically, Funcke appealed not only to sympathy for the children’s plight but also to the need to standardize state and federal immigration policy. State reforms should apply to the entire country, she maintained, so that the opportunity to return would no longer depend on the state in which a young foreigner had grown up.¹⁰¹ To mitigate critics’ concerns, Funcke promised that a federal return option would not lead to a “flood” (Überschwemmung) of foreign children into West German borders. As evidence, she cited a study concluding that, of the 17,000 eligible Turkish youths, only 4,000 would want to take advantage of such an offer.¹⁰² Despite having submitted her written pleas to Zimmermann, the Interior Minister had not responded.

After nearly a year of discussion, Kohl’s conservative government finally softened its stance. In late December 1988, the Federal Interior Ministry publicized its plans to implement the return option for foreign children who had spent most of their lives in West Germany. The decision, as several news outlets interpreted it, stemmed less from Interior Minister Friedrich Zimmermann’s concern for the children’s plight than from his desire to reconcile state and federal policy and to extend a “signal of goodwill” to the FDP and to certain Christian Democrats who had expressed support. The Interior Ministry explained that it would accept applications from young foreigners who could provide a secondary school diploma (Hauptschulabschluß) or had lived in Germany for seven years, and who had remigrated to their homeland at age fifteen or older. The application for reentry had to be submitted before their twentieth birthdays or within two years after their departure from West Germany. Successful applicants would receive new permanent residence permits only if they had secured a job or a training position in West Germany and if they could support themselves without social assistance.¹⁰³

The new policy, with some alterations, was codified in the July 1990 revision of the Foreigner Law. In a section titled “Right to Return” (Recht auf Wiederkehr), the Foreigner Law allowed migrants to receive new residence permits if they had legally lived in West Germany for eight years before their departure as a minor, had attended a West German school for at least six of those years, and applied for reentry between their sixteenth and twenty-second birthdays, or within five years of their departure. To assuage concerns about the migrants draining the social welfare system, applicants had to prove that they could finance their stay either through their own employment or through the official registration of a third party who would overtake responsibility for their livelihood for five years. Despite these restrictions, the codified policy was more lenient than originally conceived.¹⁰⁴

The 1990 revision to the Foreigner Law went one step further, however. The inescapable realization that foreign children who grew up in West Germany were, in fact, members of the national community prompted a reevaluation of the country’s citizenship law altogether. In a section entitled “Facilitated Naturalization” (Erleichterte Einbürgerung), the law enacted two milestone changes. First, it permitted “young foreigners” between the ages of sixteen and twenty-three to naturalize under similar conditions as in the “right to return” provision: if they had continually lived in West Germany for the past eight years and if they had attended school there for six years, four of which at a public school. Second, it granted all foreigners the right to naturalize, as long as they had lived in West Germany regularly for the past fifteen years, could prove that they could provide for themselves and their families without requiring social welfare, and applied for citizenship before December 31, 1995. In both cases, the applicant could not have been sentenced to a crime and had to relinquish their previous citizenship. Although the “right to return” and the “facilitated citizenship” clauses pertained to all foreigners, the target groups were guest workers and their children from countries outside the EEC: the former Yugoslavia, Morocco, Tunisia, and, of course, Turkey.¹⁰⁵

*****

The hard-fought battle for the “right to return” to West Germany reflected years of both countries’ political, scholarly, and media attention to the plight of allegedly Germanized children who had endured great hardships after returning to a homeland that they did not consider their own. Although the experiences reported in the media were not representative of all guest worker children in Turkey, and although they were often sensationalized, these reports were collectively powerful enough to garner sympathy for the children’s plight. In West Germany, the archetype of the psychologically tormented “return child” was instrumentalized to reinforce preexisting discourses condemning the imagined differences between Turkish migrants’ “authoritarian,” “backward” culture and West Germans’ “free,” “liberal,” and “democratic” society. Herein lies the paradox of West Germans’ attitudes toward these children caught between two countries. Within the boundaries of the West German nation-state, Turkish migrant children seemed to be anything but German. In Turkey, however, the Education Ministry’s last-minute scrambling to “re-Turkify” Germanized children through integration courses underscored that the problem was not insufficient integration into West Germany but rather excessive integration.

The controversial 1990 revisions to the Foreigner Law marked a sea change in German ideas about citizenship. For the first time, most leading West German policymakers, even Kohl’s Christian Democrats, formally acknowledged that guest workers and their children – even if they were Muslim – deserved the opportunity to legally become German. The timing made all the difference. Back in 1981, when Schmidt’s SPD-FDP coalition government had first proposed a citizenship law, the bill was dead on arrival – drowned out by the far more vocal demand “Turks out!” Once the 1983 remigration law passed, and once West Germans increasingly realized that only 15 percent of the Turkish population had decided to leave, they had to come to terms with the reality that Turks – even when provided financial incentives – were there to stay. And, as they observed the children’s struggles to reintegrate into Turkish society from afar, Germans were forced to realize that the children really had integrated into German society, so much so that they identified – or were externally identified – as German. By eroding the rigid boundaries of national identity, Almancı children played a key role in bringing about this milestone revision.

The timing of the citizenship reform and the “right to return” further illuminates West Germany’s efforts to position itself at the end of the Cold War as reunification with socialist East Germany loomed. The Berlin Wall had fallen on November 9, 1989, less than a year before the revised Foreigner Law went into effect, and the public sphere was abuzz with heated debates about how the two Germanies, divided for the past forty-five years, would become one. Policymakers who envisioned the reunified Federal Republic as the natural heir to West German liberal democracy could flaunt their perceived benevolence toward Turkish children. Having “rescued” the children from authoritarianism in Turkey, they could now lay claim to rescuing East Germans from the shackles of socialism. But, by deflecting the children’s abuse onto Turkey and their parents rather than acknowledging Germans’ responsibility for their hardships, this line of thinking obscured the harsher reality: in both the migrants’ perspective and the perspective of their home country, West Germany had failed to uphold its reputation as a bastion of liberal democracy. Despite the 1990 revision to the citizenship law, Turks were still viewed as “foreigners,” continued to endure racism, and fell victim to a resurgence of neo-Nazi violence.

Epilogue The Final Return?

This epilogue moves beyond the book’s primary point of chronological focus, the 1960s to the 1980s, by reflecting on the past thirty years, from the early 1990s until today. It reexamines the four core themes laid out in the introduction – return migration and transnational lives, estrangement from “home,” racism and the history of 1980s West Germany, and the inclusion of Turks and Muslims in European society – with an eye toward applying the analysis put forth in the previous six chapters to contemporary developments. Temporally, the first point of departure is the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the reunification of Germany in 1990. These events have long been viewed as a point of rupture in German history – a new sort of “zero hour” (Stunde Null) that ushered in a fundamentally different era in which liberal democracy – encapsulated in the Federal Republic – triumphed joyously over the former East Germany. Recently, though, historians like Jennifer Allen have emphasized the continuities that persisted across the 1989/1990 divide.¹ And, as Paul Betts has argued, the confusion and upheaval throughout Europe at the end of the Cold War led many Germans to fear the rise of a newly oppressive regime, perhaps even a Fourth Reich.²

Especially pertinent to this book’s narrative is the explosion of racist violence following reunification, which many migrants experienced as both a continuation and an intensification of the racism of the 1980s.³ While some West Germans felt closer to Turkish migrants than to the more than 150,000 East Germans who crossed the inter-German border, Turks, Black Germans, Jews, Roma, and other so-called “foreigners” felt increasingly – and violently – marginalized.⁴ As the renowned Afro-German poet May Ayim wrote, “A reunited Germany / celebrates itself in 1990 / without its immigrants, refugees, Jewish, and Black people. / It celebrates in its intimate circle. / It celebrates in white.”⁵ Turkish migrants summed up this sense of marginalization in the phrase “the Wall fell on us” (duvar bizim üstümüze düştü).⁶ While four major anti-foreigner attacks received widespread attention – in Hoyerswerda (1991), Rostock (1992), Mölln (1992), and Solingen (1993) – thousands of lesser-known incidents turned sidewalks, streets, train stations, restaurants, community centers, refugee homes, and private residences into spaces of danger.⁷ Crucially, two of the four major attacks – Mölln and Solingen – took place in the west. This geography alone complicates the prevailing notion that the explosion of violence in the early 1990s was primarily perpetrated by East German neo-Nazis. By highlighting the prevalence of racism in 1980s West Germany, this book has shown on a deeper level that it is no longer possible to absolve West Germans of guilt by dismissing the post-reunification violence solely as an East German import. On the contrary, racism, right-wing extremism, and violence are deeply rooted in the history of the Federal Republic.

The attacks of the early 1990s also remind us of the transnational character of this history. Immediately following the Mölln attack, for example, the Turkish parliament expressed its desire to form a committee to investigate the situation of the 1.8 million Turks living in Germany, and Turkey’s Human Rights Committee traveled to Germany for a week.⁸ The Turkish media, like in the early 1980s, continually compared the attacks to Nazi atrocities. One Milliyet headline called the Mölln attack an example of “Nazi brutality” and featured a photograph of German youths performing the Hitler salute. Another, on the front page, reported that Jews living near Mölln had begun to arm themselves.⁹ West German reporters were likewise fixated on the attack, with some expressing a fascination with the migrants’ home country, traveling to villages to interview the victims’ families. Several newspapers published the same quotation – the murderers should be punished, “otherwise our pain will never end” – from the relatives of the Aslam and Yılmaz families murdered in Mölln, who lived on the Black Sea coast.¹⁰ In the most extensive report, broadcast on the German television station ARD, a reporter traveled to Mercimek, the home village of the Genç family, five of whose members had been murdered in Solingen. Many of the interviewed villagers had themselves been guest workers before remigrating from West Germany amid the mass exodus of 1984. All feared for the safety of family members who were still in Germany. One man noted that he called his children every day and that “they could hardly speak without crying.”¹¹

On the policy level, the nexus between racism and return migration also reigned supreme – this time, increasingly targeting other minority groups. In January 1990, partially beholden to the whims of the West German government in the lead-up to eventual reunification, East German Prime Minister Lothar de Maizière implemented a version of the 1983 remigration law to reduce the number of unemployed “contract workers” (Vertragsarbeiter) from communist, socialist, and nonaligned countries.¹² As was the case in West Germany, the East German program was called “remigration assistance” (Rückkehrhilfe) and operated on the principle of “voluntary” return – all the more problematic because the GDR orchestrated unemployment from above. By October 3, the official date of reunification, the East German government had terminated the jobs of 60 percent of the country’s 90,000 contract workers, primarily those from Mozambique, Angola, and Vietnam.¹³ But the stipulations for acquiring the GDR remigration premium were even harsher than those set by the Federal Republic in 1983, and its benefits were even lower. Contract workers fired by the GDR had just three months to decide whether to return home with only 70 percent of the previous year’s salary, a one-time “money for integration” (Eingliederungsgeld) stipend of 3,000 DM, and tickets for their homeward flight.¹⁴ Reflecting ten years later, Der Spiegel called the contract workers “the first victims of reunification.”¹⁵

More broadly, within several decades, paying unwanted foreigners to “voluntarily” leave became standard practice for dealing with asylum seekers – not only in Germany but also throughout Europe. This approach assumed an increasingly transnational character upon the founding of the European Union (EU) in 1993 and the Schengen Area in 1995, whereby member states turned their attention to policing the external borders of what has been called “Fortress Europe.”¹⁶ West Germany’s 1979 REAG/GARP program, which laid the foundation for the 1983 remigration law, became the inspiration for the EU’s 2008–2013 European Return Fund, which in 2014 was recommissioned as part of the newly named Asylum, Migration, and Integration Fund (AMIF).¹⁷ Like in the 1980s, these programs have come under fire for violating migrants’ human rights and not actually being voluntary. Since the early 2000s, Human Rights Watch has denounced the International Organization for Migration (IOM) as having “no formal mandate to monitor human rights abuses” in the migrants’ home countries nor to determine whether asylum seekers’ remigration decisions were in fact voluntary and not made “under duress” or “coercive circumstances.”¹⁸ In matters of return migration, therefore, Germany and the EU have remained susceptible to criticism.

In the new millennium, Germany has experienced new heightened moments of racial reckoning that recall the tensions of biological versus cultural racism in the 1980s. In 2010, former chancellor Angela Merkel notoriously claimed that multiculturalism, or the toleration of “cultural difference” rather than the promotion of integration or assimilation, had “utterly failed” – a statement echoed shortly thereafter by British and French leaders in reference to their own countries.¹⁹ These debates were amplified by the simultaneous publication of the inflammatory tome Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany Abolishes Itself) by Thilo Sarrazin, an SPD member and the former head of the German Federal Bank. Eerily reminiscent of the racist letters written by “ordinary Germans” to West German President Carstens in the 1980s, Sarrazin’s book attributed Germany’s allegedly declining intellectual stock and inauspicious future to the high birthrates of Turks and Arabs.²⁰ As Michael Meng has explained, Sarrazin’s book, which sold a remarkable 1.3 million copies, revealed the continued silence around racism in Germany: public critiques of the book’s overt racism were overshadowed by mainstream German discourse, which portrayed it as “a generally useful, if times errant, examination of the ‘problem’ of failed integration.”²¹ Intriguingly, Sarrazin’s initial manuscript repeatedly invoked the word “race” (Rasse), but, at his publisher’s urging, he replaced it with “ethnicity” (Ethnizität).²²

Several years later, Germans transposed the call “Turks out!” onto a new Muslim enemy: asylum seekers fleeing the 2011 Syrian Civil War. Leading the charge against Syrians was the Dresden-based Islamophobic organization Patriotic Europeans against the Islamicization of the Occident (Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlands, PEGIDA), whose rallies attracted up to 20,000 Germans at its peak. The racist backlash also fueled the rise of Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, AfD), a welcome home to neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers, which in 2017 became the third largest party in the Bundestag.²³ In 2016, as politics shifted further to the right, Merkel stepped back from her previous “welcoming culture” (Willkommenskultur) by telling asylum seekers to “go back to your home country” once “there is peace in Syria again, once ISIS has been defeated in Iraq.”²⁴ As in the past, Germany has continued to offer financial incentives for “voluntary return,” although very few Syrians chose to take up the offer – just under 450 people in 2018, for example.²⁵

This book’s transnational narrative also provides insights for understanding Turkey’s increasingly volatile relationship to Germany, Europe, and the diaspora today. During the 1980s, at the height of the debates surrounding racism and return migration, there was a distinct possibility that Turkey might join the European Economic Community, with its accession planned to take effect in 1986. Turkey signed a customs agreement with the EU in 1995 and in 1999 was recognized as a candidate for full membership. Although serious negotiations for Turkey’s full membership began in 2005, these stalled due in part to Turkey’s continued human rights violations and Europeans’ growing concerns about Islam following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Turkey’s relationship to Europe worsened considerably amid the county’s turn to authoritarianism under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who served as prime minister from 2003 to 2014 and then, in a controversial and fraudulent election, became president.²⁶ Tensions were especially high after Erdoğan’s attempted 2016 military coup, which prompted unsavory memories of the 1980 coup that fueled Germans’ growing concerns about Turkish authoritarianism.²⁷ In 2018, the EU’s General Affairs Council put it bluntly: “Turkey has been moving further away from the European Union.”²⁸

What do these vast geopolitical developments mean for the 3 million Turks who still live in Germany today, and for the hundreds of thousands who have returned? The question of citizenship, for one, has become paramount. In the first decade after the 1990 revision to the German Foreigner Law, 410,000 individuals of Turkish descent – approximately 20 percent of the population – applied for German citizenship.²⁹ They did so at far higher rates than other migrant groups, accounting for 44 percent of all naturalized immigrants by the year 2000.³⁰ Naturalizations rose upon the landmark 1999 revision to the German Nationality Law, which allowed individuals born in Germany to naturalize under certain conditions regardless of ethnic heritage.³¹ Still, the debate about dual citizenship – prohibited by the 1999 German citizenship reform, though allowed in Turkey since 1981 – raged on.³² In 2014, Germany finally abandoned its so-called “option obligation” (Optionspflicht) – which had controversially forced individuals born in Germany to choose only one citizenship by age twenty-three – and began offering dual citizenship to those who had completed secondary school or vocational training in Germany, or who had lived there for at least eight years before reaching age twenty-two.³³ But many of those who have obtained legal citizenship continue to experience discrimination, racism, and identity conflicts. The Turkish-German rap group Karakan captured this paradox in a mid-1990s song, tellingly titled “Almancı Yabancı”: “Even if there is a German flag on my passport, I cannot be German because my hair is black. … Wherever we are, we don’t fit anywhere. Turkey? Is it Germany? Where is our homeland?”³⁴

Just like their decisions to travel to Germany and back, Turks’ citizenship decisions have been heavily influenced not only by their enduring emotional, material, and financial ties to their home country but also by the reciprocal nature of Turkish and German policy. In 1995, Turkey introduced the “pink card” (pembe kart) – since 2004 called the blue card (mavi kart) – to provide limited rights to individuals who had relinquished their Turkish citizenship, a concept that Ayşe Çağlar has called “citizenship light.”³⁵ These rights – which include property ownership and inheritance, but not suffrage or the right to join the civil service – reflect Turkey’s desire to retain connections to one-time citizens and its hesitation to cast them out as foreigners. In 2010, the AKP systematized these connections by establishing the Presidency for Turks Abroad and Related Communities (Yurtdışı Türkler ve Akraba Topluluklar Başkanlığı) as an umbrella organization to coordinate the various official diaspora policy groups. This organization’s motto reflects the ongoing – and politicized – perception that the migrants, despite their physical and cultural estrangement, are still part of the Turkish nation: “Wherever we have a citizen, kin, or relative, there we are.”³⁶

Whereas Turkey previously had little concrete policy toward the migrants abroad (besides courting their Deutschmarks), Erdoğan and the AKP have been much more proactive. As Ayca Arkilic has explained, since the 1990s the Turkish government has increasingly pandered to Turks abroad not because of their financial value – since remittances currently account for only 0.1 percent of Turkey’s GDP – but rather because of their political value, as they are a crucial voting bloc in Erdoğan’s quest for power.³⁷ In 2008, in response to long-term lobbying among the diaspora, Turkey began allowing citizens abroad to vote in referenda and elections by post or electronically without needing to be physically present in Turkey on election day. Since then, Erdoğan’s rampant campaigning in Germany has enflamed bilateral tensions, with Turkey flinging the types of rhetorical jabs that it hurled at Germany in the 1980s. In 2017, for example, after the German government canceled one of Erdoğan’s rallies, the right-wing, pro-Erdoğan Turkish tabloid Güneş photoshopped a Hitler mustache and an SS uniform onto a photograph of Merkel and captioned the new image “Frau Hitler.”³⁸ Amid these tensions, the relative strength of the diaspora’s support for Erdoğan has added a new layer of meaning to the term Almancı: that they are excessively clinging to their Turkish identity and failing to integrate in Germany. This view, which inadvertently reiterates longstanding racist German tropes about migrants’ perceived failure to integrate, reflects a paradox: to be a “Germanized Turk,” in this sense, is also to be a Turk who has still failed to “Germanize.”

Within the last twenty years, the so-called Almancı have been returning at much higher rates – though never to the extent of the mass exodus of 1984.³⁹ An estimated three-quarters of these returnees are between 25 and 50 years old, representing guest workers’ children and grandchildren.⁴⁰ This new wave of return migration has captured attention in Germany. A 2014 German government report divided returnees into two categories – “Almancı born in Turkey” and “Almancı born in Germany” – testifying to the persistence of the moniker.⁴¹ A well-publicized 2016 German documentary titled Tschüss Deutschland (Goodbye, Germany) profiled these “educated,” “well integrated,” and “emancipated” Almancı who wished to “return to the land of their forefathers” – adding dramatically, “Not for vacations. Forever.”⁴² As Yaşar Aydın has shown, their motivations for returning vary greatly – from family reasons, missing “home,” and cultural identity, to concerns about racism and the perception of better economic opportunities in Turkey.⁴³

With the proliferation of cell phones and the advent of social media, today’s return migrants experience fewer difficulties than the archetypically unhappy “return children” of the 1980s. Like the train stations where guest workers regularly gathered in the 1960s and 1970s, Facebook groups provide young and middle-aged return migrants a forum for networking with one another and exchanging information.⁴⁴ The groups’ thousands of members regularly post questions in both languages on a variety of logistical and mundane topics: Where can I find a three-bedroom apartment in Istanbul? What paperwork do I need to fill out to bring a cat to Turkey? Can I watch Netflix shows in German, or do I have to watch them in Turkish? How can I watch German soccer games in Turkey?⁴⁵ Also advertised in these Facebook groups are in-person happy hours and meetups with other returnees (Rückkehrer-Stammtische), the first and most prominent of which was founded in Istanbul in 2006. These meetups, as Susan Rottmann has shown, provide a crucial forum for returnees to forge friendships and vent their frustrations about life in Turkey, from their criticism of Turkish politics to their ostracization as Almancı by non-migrants.⁴⁶ One can imagine that if these communities had existed in the 1980s, the guest workers and their children who returned to Turkey following the 1983 remigration law might not have felt so isolated.

The guest workers themselves, now in their twilight years, also have enduring connections to both countries. Although never to the same extent as following the 1983 remigration law, up to an average of 14,000 per year have opted to return to Turkey since 2007.⁴⁷ To be sure, some leave Germany and never look back – “I left for a reason!” shouted one of my interview partners in the beach town of Şarköy. But for many elderly returnees, vacations remain a crucial part of life. Unlike in the 1960s and 1980s, former guest workers living in Turkey travel in the opposite direction – flying to Germany to visit their children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews who remain there. As the aging first generation finds it increasingly difficult to travel, visits from these relatives living in Germany become crucial. Another subset are the “circular migrants” who alternate, spending six months in Germany and then six months in Turkey, and who typically own or rent homes in both countries.⁴⁸ This option is especially popular among elderly migrants who rely on what they believe to be superior health care in Germany but wish to escape the cold weather.⁴⁹

As elderly migrants contemplate their mortality, the question of where they wished to be buried is central. German cemeteries have proven unpopular options, as they have historically banned Muslim burial practices such as being buried in a loin cloth.⁵⁰ Although Turkish organizations have lobbied for reforms, most elderly migrants still wish to be buried in their home villages, where their bodies can rest alongside those of their parents and ancestors. The repatriation process is complex. The German authorities are notified of a death only after the deceased’s body has been ritually washed. The deceased’s documents are then submitted to the Turkish consulate, after which the casket may be driven to the airport, where it is sealed in bubble wrap, weighed, and placed into the cargo hold of a Turkish Airlines plane en route to Turkey. To facilitate the process, the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Türk-İslam Birliği, DİTİB) has offered the opportunity to buy into a “funeral fund” (Bestattungshilfe-Fond; Cenaze Fonu) since 1992.⁵¹ As of 2011, 200,000 people had purchased this funeral insurance for the affordable price of 50 Euros per year.⁵²

For many Turkish migrants, only death and repatriation provide a sense of completion – a truly final return. By the early 2000s, elderly migrants expressed this sentiment with a darkly humorous saying: “We came by plane on the seats above, and we will go back in the cargo hold underneath.”⁵³ While morbid, the notion of death as a final return to the home country marks not a break from the migrants’ past but rather a comforting continuity. It is the poetic culmination of a lifelong transnational journey of moving back and forth between the two countries they considered home but from which they, to outside observers, had become gradually estranged.

Ultimately, it is worth meditating on what the word “return” actually means. As this book has shown, in the six-plus decades since the guest worker program began in 1961, the idea of return has been both politically and emotionally charged, public and private, voluntary and coercive, temporary and permanent. Among the many sorts of returns that this book has charted – from returns within the heart, to returns on vacations, to returns amid the mass exodus of the 1980s – it is the idea of permanence and finality that looms the most. But what does it really mean to make one’s “final return,” the endgültige Rückkehr or kesin dönüs that so dominated discussions in both countries in the 1980s? What does it mean to go back permanently to a place that one, at least physically, had left behind? Where does the line between temporariness and permanence lie? What does it mean to go “home,” when the very notion of home is shifting and contingent? These are not questions that can be answered by policy or dictated from above. They are matters of the heart, matters of the soul, and matters of human beings who all shape their own stories.

*****

By following the migrants as they moved back and forth across borders, this book has highlighted their agency and their emotional lives. From 1961 to 1990, guest workers and their children navigated the constraints of both German and Turkish domestic and international politics and economics as both countries’ governments strove to police their cross-border movement – with the German government trying to promote their return, and the Turkish government trying to prevent it. But return migration was both physical and emotional. All migrants – even those who stayed in Germany – grappled with their changing relationships to their identities, their sense of “home,” and the people whom they left behind. Every day was a journey back and forth between two countries, leading many to question where they belonged. Physically traveling to Turkey was not always a return to a static “homeland,” but rather a journey to a place that had transformed in their absence and from which they had become increasingly estranged.

In the end, however, there was no such thing as a “final return.” Even for those who returned to Turkey following the 1983 remigration law, whose residence permits were stamped “invalid” at the border, the attachment to Germany remained. These “permanent returnees,” or kesin dönüsçü, remained forever connected to West Germany – in how they saw themselves, and how non-migrants in Turkey saw them. Ostracized as Almancı, they could never shake the association with Germany, even if they tried to hide it. It was inescapable: Germany had become part of them, and they had become part of Germany. These separation anxieties developed over time on overlapping levels, from the family and local community to the nation. And they intersected with a variety of issues: gender and sexuality, vacations across Cold War Europe, global finance and development, West German popular and state-sanctioned racism, and education. The result was that the migrants felt a parallel sense of exclusion in both countries. For them, integrating in Germany was just one side of the story. Reintegrating in Turkey posed another set of challenges.

On a larger scale, the experiences of guest workers force us to consider Turkish history as part of German history – and vice versa. Rather than a peripheral “bridge” across continents, Turkey was a crucial actor that exerted much power vis-à-vis Germany. By decrying the migrants as Germanized, individuals in Turkey – from policymakers and journalists to even the poorest of villagers – dictated the contours of West German national identity from afar. By comparing anti-Turkish racism to antisemitism under Nazism, Turks continually exposed the hypocrisy of West German liberalism. And Turkey’s mistreatment of returning migrants, especially children following the 1980 military coup, amplified ongoing contestations over West German democracy and Turkish authoritarianism. Debates surrounding racism and return migration were fundamentally connected to larger questions about Turkey’s integration into European supranational institutions and the idea of “Europe.” Although migration undoubtedly tied the two countries together, it also pulled them apart – with enduring consequences today.