Foreign at home : Turkish-German migrants and the boundaries of Europe, 1961-1990
Keywords: History.

This dissertation examines the transnational history of Turkish guest worker families in Germany, emphasizing how their physical mobility across national borders, as well as state-driven efforts to facilitate or impede their mobility, reshaped ideas about German, Turkish, and European identities in a globalizing postwar world. It begins in 1961, when the West German government first began recruiting Turkish guest workers, and ends in 1990, a year marked by several developments: German reunification, the liberalization of German citizenship law, and renewed discussions about Turkey's compatibility with a post-Cold War conception of European belonging. At the core of the dissertation is an examination of the gradual process by which guest worker families came to feel foreign in both Germany and Turkey, the two countries they considered home. It traces the historical development of the term "Almancı, " a derogatory Turkish term that still today connotes the impression that the migrants living in Germany (Almanya) have undergone a process of Germanization and have become not only physically but also culturally estranged from the Turkish national community. The origins of this term extend as far back as the formal recruitment years (1961-1973), when guest workers were first separated from their families and rumors about adultery and infidelity spread. Simultaneously, as guest workers returned to their home cities and villages with cars and other luxurious western consumer goods, the stereotype developed that the migrants had transformed into a nouveau-riche class of superfluous spenders out of touch with the economic needs of their homeland. This history is deeply entwined with the rising xenophobia in 1980s West Germany. The dissertation's centerpiece is an investigation of the motivations and consequences of West German government's 1983 Law for the Promotion of Voluntary Return (Rückkehrförderungsgesetz), which paid unemployed former guest workers a "remigration premium" (Rückkehrprämie) of 10,500 Deutschmarks to pack their bags, take their spouses and children, and return to their home country within a brief timespan of just ten months. The dissertation traces how this controversial effort to "kick out the Turks" provoked the ire of the Turkish government, which used humanitarian rhetoric to obscure the underlying motivation for its opposition to the law: for largely economic reasons, the Turkish government did not desire an influx of return migrants. The migrants were thus left unwanted by the governments of both countries they considered home. Finally, the dissertation examines the consequences of the 1983 law, which brought about the largest remigration wave in the countries' postwar history, with 15% of West Germany's Turkish population (approximately 250,000 men, women, and children) returning to Turkey in 1984 alone. The final chapter emphasizes the struggles of the archetypical second-generation "return children" (Rückkehrkinder) who accompanied their parents to Turkey following the 1983 remigration law and became symbols of the possibilities and limitations of national belonging in both countries. Turning the concept of "integration" on its head, the dissertation argues that, amid the longstanding discourses about Germanization and cultural estrangement, many "Almancı" found that reintegration in their own homeland was often just as difficult as integration in Germany.