The Guest Worker Myth How Turkish Immigrant Communities Rebuilt West Berlin 1960S - 1980S

1 The Guest Worker Myth How Turkish Immigrant Communities Rebuilt West Berlin 1960s - 1980s Undergraduate Research Thesis, Department of History The Ohio State University Sarah Stradling Project Advisor: Dr. Robin Judd, Department of History 2 Contents Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………………………………..3 Chapter 1 An Introduction to Recruitment ………………………………………………………………………………………………….12 Chapter 2 Hansaviertel and Heime: Modernist Revival and Guest Worker Dormitories ……………………………………………………………………………………………………18 Chapter 3 Urban Renewal and Life on the Border in the 1960s: Remaking the City from Above and Below ……………………………………………………………………………………………………32 Chapter 4 Collapse of the Guest Worker Myth: Housing Discrimination, “Ghettoization,” And Resistance in 1970s West Berlin ……………………………………………………………………………………………………45 Chapter 5 Integration, Religion, and Advocacy: Participatory Urban Planning in Theory and in Practice ……………………………………………………………………………………………………68 Epilogue Reflections on Integration and “German” Identity ……………………………………………………………………………………………………86 Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………………………………………88 3 truly hospitable these germans are they christened us guest workers -Yüksel Pazarkaya1 Introduction In the 1960s and 1970s, West Berlin was at the center of the world’s attention. Plagued by Cold War divisions, all eyes were focused on the city’s seemingly miraculous physical and economic renewal. Modern housing compounds by world famous Bauhaus émigrés drew visitors and press attention, and the currency reform of 1948 had seemingly sparked an economic miracle (Wirtschaftswunder). However, there is an essential story that is often only a footnote in this history of urban renewal: the so-called “guest workers” (Gastarbeiter). From the 1950s until 1973, Germany recruited thousands of foreign workers from countries like Spain, Yugoslavia, and Turkey to temporarily increase their production capacity. The workers were hired upon a rotation principle – after just a few years, they were to return home and make space for new recruits. Living in dormitories under strict curfews and restrictions, a far cry from the city’s modernist housing complexes that advertised freedom and democracy, the Gastarbeiter were seen as easily replaceable participants in the German economic miracle. This thesis elaborates on the story of West Berlin’s transformation from the 1960s through the 1980s by complicating conventional macro-narratives of urban transformations. It moves beyond West Berlin’s origin myths in order to acknowledge Turkish immigrants as central and active agents in West Berlin’s evolution. Drawing on archival research in Germany, each chapter approaches West Berlin’s story from two perspectives. First, I discuss big picture 1 Yüksel Pazarkaya “gastarbeiter” 1989, DOMiD. 4 changes in the city, addressing flashy building expositions and ambitious top-down policy initiatives. With this framework in place, each section then zeroes in on the lives of Turkish guest workers living in the city. From the long train ride to Germany, to the founding of so- called “backyard mosques” (Hinterhofmoscheen) and small businesses, these sections round out the story of Germany’s island of democracy in the East. It is impossible to fully understand the larger-scale changes happening in West Berlin without investigating the influence of the Turkish immigrants in the city, and vice versa. This entanglement complicates the preconception that Turkish immigrants lived in isolated “parallel societies” within German borders. Although Turkish modes of belonging diverged from common political definitions of integration, the “guest workers” were never simply economic contributors. Since their arrival, Turkish immigrants have influenced their surroundings and shaped urban spaces to fit their needs. This happened in conversation with German institutions and residents, not in complete isolation. Investigating these tangled narratives contributes to a more holistic understanding of the relationship between immigrants and their newfound communities. Taking Stock and Notes on Methodology In the more than 50 years since Germany began recruiting Turkish ‘guest workers,’ a quickly growing body of work has analyzed the success, or more commonly the failure, of Germany’s immigration policy. Much of this work, in the fields of sociology, political science, and history, seeks to apply either micro- or macro-level theory to the processes of Turkish migration and integration.2 Historian Rita Chin, for example, has published enormously 2 Influential macro-level works include: Karin Hunn, “Nächstes Jahr kehren wir zurück--”: die Geschichte der türkischen “Gastarbeiter” in der Bundesrepublik (Wallstein Verlag, 2005).; Annika Hinze, Turkish Berlin: Integration Policy and Urban Space, Globalization and Community; Volume 21 (Minneapolis: University of 5 influential work studying the role of Turkish cultural elites as well as the roles of democracy and race in ‘guest worker’ integration.3 Much of the existing literature has also focused on the period post-1973, after recruitment officially ended. For example, several socio-cultural analyses, including musicologist Thomas Solomon’s investigation of transnational Turkish-German rap, have focused on Turkish identity formation related to “Muslim-ness” in 1990s Germany.4 More recently, historians have adopted a more ethnographic-centered Alltagsgeschichte (everyday history) approach that addressed the early experiences of ‘guest workers’ in West Germany. In 2018, for example, historians Sarah Thomsen Vierra and Jennifer Miller both published insightful books about Turkish migrants’ lived experiences.5 These two works fold in concepts like spatiality and identity-building that I incorporate in this work as well. I draw much of my Alltagsgeschichte analytical framework from geographer Patricia Ehrkamp’s spatial analysis of 1990s Marxloh, a predominantly Turkish neighborhood in Cologne.6 Ehrkamp questions assimilationist discourses in order to re-evaluate the interactions between immigrants and immigrant-receiving communities.7 Minnesota Press, 2013).; Mark E. Spicka, “Guest Workers, Social Order, and West German Municipalities, 1960– 7,” Journal of Contemporary History 54, no. 3 (July 2019): 619–39. Influential ethnographic/Alltagsgeshichte works include: Wolfgang Kil and Hilary Silver, “From Kreuzberg to Marzahn: New Migrant Communities in Berlin,” German Politics and Society 24, no. 4 (December 1, 2006): 95– 121.; Gökçe Yurdakul, From Guest Workers into Muslims: The Transformation of Turkish Immigrant Associations in Germany (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Pub., 2009). 3 Rita Chin, The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).; Rita Chin, Eley, Geoff, and Grossman, Atina, After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009). 4 Thomas Solomon, “Hardcore Muslims: Islamic Themes in Turkish Rap in Diaspora and in the Homeland,” Yearbook for Traditional Music 38 (2006): 59–78. Patricia Ehrkamp, “‘We Turks Are No Germans’: Assimilation Discourses and the Dialectical Construction of Identities in Germany,” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 38, no. 9 (September 2006): 1673–92. 5 Sarah Thomsen Vierra, Turkish Germans in the Federal Republic of Germany: Immigration, Space, and Belonging 1961-1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).; Jennifer A. Miller, Turkish Guest Workers in Germany: Hidden Lives and Contested Borders, 1960s to 1980s (Toronto; University of Toronto Press, 2018). 6 Patricia Ehrkamp, “‘We Turks Are No Germans.’” 7 Ibid. 6 This project is in close conversation with this evolving research, and contributes to the field through a unique presentation of the Gastarbeiter story. The structure is strictly chronological, and extends from the moment of recruitment in Turkey to the fall of the Berlin Wall. I made the conscious decision to move away from a thematic approach in order to emphasize the evolution of West Berlin alongside the ‘guest worker’ experience. 8 Each chapter approaches a specific time period using two analytical frameworks. The first perspective integrates the city- and nation-wide scales; this includes landmark government immigration policy, the West German zeitgeist, and trends in West Berlin’s city planning. The second side of the story is the Alltagsgeschichte, the everyday experiences of immigrants. These individual stories, several of which I found doing archival research, question oversimplified government narratives and challenge assumptions enveloped in the ‘guest worker’ myth. This thesis is by no means a comprehensive account of what it means, or has meant, to be a ‘guest worker’ in Germany. Firstly, this study focuses exclusively on ‘Turkish’ immigrants.9 This focus is both narrow and broad; narrow in that ‘guest workers’ came from a wide range of countries, and broad in that the term ‘Turkish’ can mean many things. Using the term ‘Turkish’ is not meant to leave out minority groups like the Kurds, nor is it meant to gloss over intracultural differences. It is, unfortunately, a term of convenience in the history that follows. Secondly, although this project weaves in broad themes that transcend the city-level, West Berlin is the centerpiece. This history is not meant to stand in for other German regions with high numbers of immigrants, like the Ruhrgebiet. Berlin is the city where I conducted my research, 8In Turkish Germans in the Federal Republic of Germany, for

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