Poorly educated Turkish migrants were primed for exploitation. Investigative journalist Günter Wallraff spent two years in disguise as an unqualified Turkish worker. German society was shocked by his 1985 bestseller Ganz Unten (translated into English as Lowest of the Low), which described horrific racism and unprovoked attacks. He had earned a pittance, worked without protective equipment in dangerous environments and lived in social isolation. Wallraff found that the workers were treated like disposable tools. Some were trafficked by gangs. The book had an impact and Germans began speaking to their Turkish neighbours for the first time.
Reunification in 1990 produced yet another wave of pressure. “There was huge chaos,” says Berlin-based sociologist Gökçe Yurdakul, author of From Guest Workers into Muslims. “East Germans needed work and West Germany had to provide factory jobs for them. Helmut Kohl’s government offered compensation to Turkish workers so they would go.” The contrast with British multiculturalism here is striking. A generation after the beginnings of mass immigration in the UK, subsidies to encourage repatriation were occasionally discussed, but only on the right-wing fringes.
Severson—who arrived under the original guest worker scheme at 21—was among the tens of thousands who left Germany at this time, along with her family. She was tempted by the 10,500 mark payment and wished to live closer to her extended family. But years of hard work had also left her with disabling back pains; many other Turkish German workers also suffered long-term health issues.
For those who stayed, racist attacks increased. In one especially shocking case in 1993, five members of a Turkish family, including children, were killed when four neo-Nazis burned down their home in Solingen, the birthplace of Adolf Eichmann. In response to such attacks, Turkish vigilante groups were formed. Progressive mainstream politicians began championing greater rights for migrants, but Germany did not accept that it was a “country of immigration” for many years.
After 9/11, Turkish Germans were suddenly viewed not so much as Turks but as Muslims—potential objects of fear as well as disdain, but also people who had to be “managed.” Yurdakul said that German efforts to work with and fund Muslim organisations had the unintended consequence of encouraging the less devout to become more visibly religious, so as to appear more authentic representatives of their community: “To access the funding, I know of at least two people who grew beards.”
But if resources were thrown at “community engagement,” it was hardly enough to compensate the Turkish community for a rising mood of fear and resentment among the majority. In 2010, a Social Democratic Party politician and Bundesbank board member, Thilo Sarrazin, published a book called Deutschland Schafft Sich Ab—Germany Abolishes Itself. It argued that Germany’s post-war approach to immigration had been wrong, and that it now had to restrict Muslim immigration or be overwhelmed. Described to me by one of the first Turkish Germans to enter politics—the Green Party’s Özcan Mutlu—as having “opened a real Pandora’s box,” it fast became a “Bible for xenophobes.” Later it was an inspiration for Alternative für Deutschland, which was founded in 2013 principally as an anti-euro party, but soon descended into far-right chauvinism.
“After 9/11, Turkish Germans were viewed not only as potential objects of fear, but also as people who had to be ‘managed’”
The book had such effect because it tapped into real resentment: in 2010, 30 per cent of Germans thought the country was overrun by migrants. Politicians felt like they had to respond. Which brings us to Merkel’s remark that multiculturalism had “utterly failed,” and her suggestion that Germany needed to step up its integration programme.
The long-serving Chancellor has a curious role in Germany’s immigration story. She has personally cleaved to her Christian Democratic Party’s socially conservative instincts—for example, although she catalysed the vote that legalised gay marriage, she voted against the reform. On multiculturalism, as recently as 2013, her government’s dual citizenship reforms excluded swathes of Turks. At the same time, though, she championed immigrant forums and cross-cultural outreach.
And then there was her groundbreaking approach to Syrian refugees, allowing in one million of them in 2015—a policy which, she told parliament, was informed by the mistakes made with Gastarbeiter. She threw open Germany’s borders with the words “wir schaffen das” (“we can do this”). Crucially, she backed integration programmes from day one. She encouraged vocational training, mandatory language lessons, fast-track work permits and financial incentives for company traineeships. Though there have been inevitable teething problems, there are also signs of hope: in this September’s general election, former law student Tareq Alaows hopes to become the first Syrian in the Bundestag.
Some battles have always been exported from Turkey—Kurds and leftists versus Turkish nationalists, secularists versus Islamists, and so on. Now the divide is pro- and anti-Erdoğan: the controversial President’s embrace of Turkish Germans as potential voters has angered Berlin and damaged the minority’s image in the process. A new group of exiles arrived after Erdoğan started jailing opponents, following the attempted coup in 2016. They haven’t all been welcomed by the more settled Turkish community, half of which supports Erdoğan. Some dissidents say they have been threatened by locals. In December, German-born boxer Ünsal Arık was stabbed after wearing a T-shirt criticising the President.
Many Germans don’t understand why Turkish Germans, who mostly vote centre-left in Germany, back the hardline conservative in Ankara. There may be a simple answer: German Greens and Social Democrats are relatively generous to migrants, but Erdoğan nurtures a mythical, welcoming motherland image that is seductive to those feeling alienated.
This alienation is starting to be properly analysed only now. Seyran Bostancı, 34, is a doctoral candidate based in Berlin whose grandparents originally came from Turkey. In a dexterous mixture of English, German and Turkish, she explains how it was only when she wrote a masters thesis on racism in education that she fully understood the discrimination she had faced at school. “My son is five. He’s already understood how the world functions—that German has positive and Turkish negative connotations. I hope he won’t struggle as I did. He has educated parents, more capital, more privilege than we did. But I despair that I still won’t be able to protect him from experiencing discrimination.”
Even for national treasures, the mood can turn sour. When Özil was photographed posing with Erdoğan in 2018, German football officials attacked the supposedly conflicted loyalties of the pious Muslim who didn’t sing the national anthem properly—and who, despite being one of the most talented players of his generation, had lost form playing for Germany. Özil quit the national team, accusing the president of the football federation of racism. “I am German when we win, immigrant when we lose,” he said. When he joined Istanbul’s Fenerbahçe this year, a newspaper referred to his “return to Turkey.” Born in North Rhine-Westphalia, Özil has never previously lived in Turkey. “When the Erdoğan picture happened German people said, ‘we suspected he wasn’t really ours and here’s the proof,’” said Hacı-Halil Uslucan, Professor of Modern Turkish Studies and Integration at the University of Duisburg-Essen.
Most Turkish German backstories include an element of “othering.” Yılmaz Atalay, the Turk proud to be moving to Germany who we met at the start of this piece, was once rejected by a landlord who didn’t want a Turk in his flat. Cem Özdemir, former Green Party co-leader, still receives death threats from the far right. Turkish names don’t help on job applications. One successful professional told me she was spat at. Another was called a cockroach. Zeynep Korkmaz Aslan, a language teacher who moved to Turkey as a teenager but has now returned to Germany, was disdained in German schools and called “snooty” in Turkish ones. Her oldest child, a top student in Turkey, was automatically placed in a low-achieving school in Germany. “Old assumptions about Turks being bad students persist,” Korkmaz Aslan told me sadly, making it harder to
raise standards.
In noisy debates about integration, such voices get lost. “There is a fog of misunderstanding,” says Aydın Bayad, who is working on a new government-supported Bielefeld University study on migrant social cohesion. “Both countries are trying to make political manoeuvres around Turkish Germans, but nobody has actually sought their views.”
As the debate about migrants becomes noisy, young Turkish Germans are becoming bolshy too. Turkish rappers use the insults thrown at them in their lyrics. More sensitive to discrimination and implicit bias, a new generation is less tolerant of injustice. They join groups such as the pro-diversity, anti-racism Neue Deutsche Organisation. Uslucan says this is not a sign of failure, but success. It’s the integration paradox—the more integrated a group actually is, the more keenly it feels prejudice. “The first generation wasn’t bothered about being second-class citizens,” he says. “My parents don’t watch German TV or read the newspapers so don’t know what’s said about them. But 15-year-old Mehmet thinks he should be treated the same as Rolf or Sabine.”
The post-2016 arrivals—scientists, writers, artists, academics—have formed an instant community of educated Turkish migrants who ought to integrate fast. Can Dündar, former editor of the opposition newspaper Cumhuriyet who now lives in Berlin, told me he was busier than ever thanks to Germans’ interest in Turkey and Turkish Germans.
The diversity of this group—illiterate elderly migrants, workers, professionals, social elites and the left behind, Alevis, Sunnis, Kurds and Turks—has long rendered it problematic to treat them as a single undifferentiated mass, even though that is how the discussion is often framed.
Even so, “the Gastarbeiter taught Germany that being a one-way society only for blonde Germans is not the only option,” says academic Ulrich Herbert. And today, finally, the contributions of Turkish migrants are increasingly acknowledged in Germany—more varied food, entrepreneurialism, a more diverse arts scene—more, in other words, of everything humanity has to offer. As the dramatist Max Frisch wrote: “We called for workers, but people came.”
