In 1980, Turkish entrepreneur Atalay Özçakır decided to bring part of Istanbul to West Berlin when he opened a “Grand Bazaar” in the shuttered Bülowstraße U-Bahn station in Schöneberg. Over the next decade, this bazaar served as a hub of the Turkish community in West Berlin. The Bazaar was not only a place where they could purchase familiar foods and clothing but also a stage for performance where Turkish stars like Zeki Müren and Bülent Ersoy were welcome even though they had both been banned from the Turkish state after the 1980 putsch. In 1991, as the once-divided city knitted itself back together in the process of unification, the U-Bahn station came back into service, and the bazaar itself was forced to close.
The history of the subway bazaar, one of many retold in Stefan Zeppenfeld's excellent study, recapitulates much of his argument about the role of Turkish migrants and their descendants in the recent history of Berlin, today the single most “Turkish” city outside of Turkey itself. The construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 spurred the mass recruitment of Turkish workers into the city, but people who initially arrived as labor migrants took up a variety of jobs in the decades to follow. Starting before the 1973 recruitment stop and accelerating in the late 1970s and 1980s, Turkish citizens and their descendants expanded into new occupational sectors that the architects of the labor recruitment had not anticipated. Many of them experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent reunification of Berlin as a far more significant change for their labor biography than the 1973 recruitment stop. Industrial employers responded to the loss of the “Berlin subvention” by relocating, jobs formerly performed by Turks now went to East Germans, and Turkish unemployment sharply increased. Despite these difficulties, Turkish citizens continued to adapt to changing conditions in the city that had become their home. In the 1990s, a much greater number of them became self-employed, including through the expansion of Turkish-owned retail chains in Germany, while others were able to further their careers in the public service. While the Turkish community was decisively shaped by the city's division, Turks were also in a position to shape the city's unification.
Zeppenfeld's major innovation is his decision to expand his purview from the traditional sites of “guest work,” above all the factory, into a much broader understanding of “working worlds,” including such categories as public sector careers, professional careers, self-employment, and even various forms of illegal labor, including both unauthorized work and the drug trade. Across seven chapters, he shows that Turkish migrants developed their own work biographies and career paths that reached far beyond what the West German state had envisioned. He uses statistical information to trace changing patterns of education, employment, and social mobility, consistently integrating class and gender into his analysis alongside ethnic background. While relatively few Turkish citizens were able to experience significant upward social mobility during this time, the book shows that over time the work biographies of Turkish workers came to resemble those of German workers. It remains an open question precisely to what degree this “normalization” was a process of Turkish citizens approaching existing German norms and to what degree it was due to structural changes in the economy that eroded what was once a “normal labor biography” for everyone within the Federal Republic.
The nature of Zeppenfeld's innovation in defining the “working world” expansively means that he draws on a wide range of sources and that the level of detail he is able to achieve necessarily varies. Sections on Siemens and on self-employment read as quite comprehensive, while others, such as the section on drug dealing, are necessarily more speculative. In the latter section, readers learn that the fall of the Berlin Wall decisively changed both the geography of the European drug trade and the identity of those involved in moving product, but we are largely unable to trace what happened to former Turkish drug dealers in unified Berlin. Zeppenfeld also does not make use of existing Turkish-language sources, leaving opportunities for historians who might wish to take a more transnational approach. Did the Turkish media frame first West and later unified Berlin as places opportunity or as locations of immiseration? Historians of everyday life might also ask questions about the meaning that people made of their own work biographies. How did they narrate their decisions to seek work in specific sectors, to open a business, or to choose to study at a German university? How did they understand the discrimination that made significant social mobility so difficult to achieve?
While I've offered many suggestions for further research, that is only to underscore the fact that this book is a major contribution not only to migration history but also to labor and urban history. Historians of Berlin will find important insights about how patterns of self-employment changed neighborhood dynamics, while historians of other cities could ask questions about whether Berlin was exceptional or typical in its dynamics. For example, Zeppenfeld notes in passing that in West Berlin in the 1970s fewer than 10 percent of city cleaners were foreign, while in Munich already by 1970 over 90 percent of city cleaners were foreign. What was it about the two cities that accounted for such a disparity? Labor historians and historians of contemporary Germany no longer have any excuse for not considering the experiences of Turkish migrants in the period “after the boom.” Turkish migrants and their descendants are intrinsically part of German history, and Stefan Zeppenfeld has written a marvelous book about how a city shaped their opportunities and how their own choices actively reshaped that city.
