Turkish Immigration to Germany (1961-1990s)

With generous funding from the Abbasi Program, I spent five weeks in Ankara, Turkey, this summer during the month of Ramadan. As an historian of Modern Germany focusing on the everyday experiences of Turkish immigrants from 1961 through the 1990s, I approached the grant period with two primary goals: to improve my Turkish languages skills already acquired at Stanford, and to explore the possibility of developing a dissertation that tackles pressing questions of integration, multiculturalism, and religious cultural clash from a transnational, less Eurocentric perspective. I am pleased to report that I accomplished both of these goals. Through an intensive Turkish course at Ankara University’s TÖMER language program and a home stay with a warm and welcoming host mother, my oral and verbal Turkish communication and comprehension skills vastly improved; I can now read Turkish archival documents with little difficulty and am proficient in conversational Turkish. In my spare time, I networked with other scholars of European migration and integration at Bilkent University and investigated primary and secondary research materials at the Republican Archives and National Library. Finally, I had the privilege of conducting nearly a dozen preliminary oral history interviews with former Turkish guest workers who had returned from Germany to retire in the pleasant beach town of Şarköy. My experience in Turkey not only gave me a deeper, more personal understanding this particular Muslim society but also fundamentally influenced my approach to my dissertation.

When I arrived in Ankara, I was struck immediately by the extent to which the subject of Turkish immigrants in Germany still resonates with individuals in Turkey today. Whether it was my taxi driver’s stories about his relatives in Germany or my host mother’s excited recollection of seeing an “Ankara Market” in Cologne during a 1975 vacation, I realized the potential to write an innovative dissertation that considers Turkish integration in Germany alongside the transnational connections between migrant Turks and their friends and family in the home country. The anecdotes from my oral history partners were most revealing. Far from the negative stories of religious clash so prevalent in the German media today, my interview partners relayed fond memories of friendships with their German coworkers and neighbors in the 1960s and 1970s. The major religious problem they encountered was food-related—the prevalence of pork (Schweinfleisch) in the German host country—and was quickly ameliorated by asking for an alternative meal in the factory dining commons or by hosting pork-free picnics with German school friends. While I realize that this is only a small sample, their stories reshaped my research questions. How the situation they reported transitioned into the contemporary divisive narrative of non-integration of Muslim cultural clash now counts among one of my guiding questions.

Outside my academic work, the ability to experience the diversity of Turkish culture on a deeply personal level also impacted the way I approach my conception of Turkey. A major methodological question with which I grapple as a Europeanist is how to integrate the history of Turkey with the history of Europe, or the extent to which we can consider Turkey part of a cultural notion of an imagined Europe in an increasingly globalizing postwar world. Often I found myself taking a subjective approach: walking around reflecting upon whether the situation I was in felt European, or asking Turks whom I encountered whether they considered themselves or their nation-state European. Soon, I realized the problems associated with asking that question in the first place. The country and its population’s spatial, socioeconomic, religious, and political diversity precludes me from such a totalizing thought process. Witnessing this diversity firsthand has helped me deconstruct the monolithic categories of “Turks” and “Muslims” and to approach my investigation of the Turkish immigrant experience in Germany with much more nuance.