“What will you do when you return to Turkey?” / “Die!”
by Deniz Arslan
In the 1950s and 1960s, people were specifically recruited to work in Germany. As a result of the postwar economic boom, there was a shortage of workers, so agreements were signed to recruit foreign workers from: Italy (1955), Spain and Greece (1960), Turkey (1961), and other countries. The recruitment program was ended in 1973 with the so-called “recruitment freeze.”
Federal Agency for Civic Education
Why does a person leave the country where they were born and raised to live elsewhere? There are many possible answers to this question, but their common thread is likely that those who left were following a dream. Of course, everyone has their own dream. Dreams differ in their intensity, social background, aspirations, and content. Like many other migrants, those who moved to Germany from Turkey, Greece, Italy, Yugoslavia, North Africa, and many other regions of the world were driven by such a dream. The details of these dreams may have differed from one another, but they all had one thing in common: the hope for a better life. A good life—not only for themselves, but also for those they had brought with them, those they had to leave behind, and even for those who had not yet been born.
With a few exceptions, the so-called guest workers came to Germany because poverty in their home countries had become overwhelming. Because the tiny plots of land that remained after countless divisions of inheritance would not have been enough to feed the whole family, even if gold had grown on them. Because they knew they could not spend their lives in the factories of their not-yet-fully-industrialized home countries—without insurance, without registration, sometimes working for nothing more than a piece of bread. And because, although the ideal of equal opportunity was looming on the horizon, it was still a long way from reaching the vast rural areas of their homelands.
There’s one thing we mustn’t forget: They saw Germany as an opportunity. Just as Germany saw them as an opportunity.
Most of them just wanted to come for a few years, work, save up some money for a piece of land, a tractor, or a house, and then go back. And indeed, there were those who did exactly that. But some—many—couldn’t go back, or simply didn’t. The reasons for this would be a topic in itself, but this permanent stay felt like a rule introduced after the fact, one that completely disrupted the painstakingly balanced equilibrium. It presented both the hosts and the guests with an unexpectedly difficult situation.
The hosts’ intention—they called them “guest workers” from the very beginning—was clear. By definition, a guest is someone who comes and leaves as soon as the visit is over. The immigrants were supposed to come, work in the factories assigned to them, sleep in dormitories, refrain from participating in the country’s social life as much as possible, and, as soon as they were no longer needed, express their gratitude to Germany and return to their hometowns. Their own expectations, too, were not really that different. But as a Turkish proverb says:
What works at home often doesn’t work in the marketplace.
In the film “Almanya Acı Vatan / Germany, Bitter Homeland,” a guest worker—who has been honored by the Berlin government as the best street sweeper—is asked during the award ceremony what he plans to do when he returns to Turkey. The man replies, “What am I going to do? I’m going to die!” The interpreter then says to him in Turkish, “I can’t translate that—please say something nice.”
