Fifty years ago, in Germany the gestarbeiter politics, that influenced all the European migration policies till now, was born. The immigrant comes and goes. Doesn’t become a citizen, he is purely and simply a temporary worker. He arrives alone in the host country without his own family because in few years he will have to go back to his home country. Despite the fact that after half a century the history has totally disproved this theory. It was the beginning of November 1961, when the West German government- after having signed similar agreements with Italy and Greece- opened its borders also to Turkish immigrants. Who, although considered “host workers”, have set their roots in Germany and most of them has gained the civitatis status.
The recent visit in Berlin of the Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan, actually to celebrate the 1961 agreement, has been the occasion to reopen the debate, never sedated, on integration of immigrants coming from the ex Ottoman Empire.
Erdogan has pointed the finger at the German education system (“Turkish language should be taught in elementary school as a mother tongue for immigrants”) and immigration policies, criticizing the expected German language book introduction for women who want to reunited with their husband (“What language does love speak?”) and the unexpected possibility to obtain the double citizenship.
For her part, Mrs Merkel preferred skating over, saying just that she is both the native Germans and immigrants Prime Minister. The Ministry of the Interior Friedrich is the one who answered: the christian-liberal exponent of the executive excluded any possibility for a double-citizenship and confirmed the importance of teaching German, a key to succeed in life.
The latest fifty years of history of Turkish immigration is well told in the Auf Zeit. Für immer book (“For ashort time. For ever”), edited by Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung; the two editors, Jeannette Goddar and Dorte Huneke, have interviewed fourteen immigrants-most of all first generation ones- and written their memories, dreams and hopes of youth at the time they arrived in Germany, where they lived for decades.
Man and women, who lived a sort of identity “limb”: Germans used to call them Gastarbeiter “host workers”. At the same time, the Turkish word Gubert (“overseas, far away land”) started to be used as a synonymous of Germany. In their homeland, the German Turkish people begun to be called Guberçti “belonged to a alien land”.
“If at that time someone would have asked to me, ‘do you feel Turkish or German?’, I would have answered with no doubt: ‘I feel Turkish!’”, says Mesut Ergün, a left activist who decided to emigrate in Germany in ’69, after the escalation of the politics of violence in his country. In 2007, together with his wife Ingrid, came back to Bosphorus to open an hotel. “in any case-says-relationships with Germans are not anymore as if I was a foreigner: I have a German lover, I am well integrated in Frankfurt where I used to have friends and German clients”.
The Federal Republic not only represented the destination of the Gastarbeiter, but also of those who in Turkey couldn’t live freely: political activists, Kurdish, members of the Greek community. It is the case of Eva and Sokrates Saroglu, escaped from Istanbul during the ‘60s: “Our city doesn’t exist anymore, we have been far away for too long”, says Sokrates, remembering the first trip back to Turkey in 1992. “What is sure is that in Germany we are not guests anymore”.
We also went to talk to one of these first generation immigrants: a Turkish women, arrived in the Western part of Berlin in the early ‘70s when she was just a girl, who will tell us about her story in the next West issues.
On the inside: