On Track for West Germany: Turkish 'Guest-worker' Rail Transportation to West Germany in the Postwar...

German History Vol. 30, No. 4, pp. 550–573

© The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the German History Society.All rights reserved. doi:10.1093/gerhis/ghs074

On Track for West Germany: Turkish ‘Guest-worker’ Rail Transportation to West

Germany in the Postwar Period*

Jennifer A. Miller

In the early morning fog that blanketed the Salzburg train station, a reporter from Salzburger Nachrichten, Werner Kobes, impatiently awaited the overdue ‘Hellas-Istanbul Express’, more commonly known as the ‘Guest-worker Express’.1 The train primarily carried Turkish ‘guest-workers’, but it also picked up travelling vacationers in Yugoslavia and Greece on the way to West Germany. Local authorities had granted Kobes, as a reporter for SN, permission in June 1969 to experience the infamous train first hand in order to answer the following questions: ‘Does the “Guest-worker Express” ... really resemble a cattle transport for the civilized people of the twentieth century?’ ‘Is it true in all honesty that no “normal” traveller would dare to travel on this train?’ ‘Is it really as bad as reported?’2 Indeed, for Kobes, simply boarding was a ‘nearly unsolvable problem’, because there was not a centimetre of free space.3 The Salzburg Rail Administration had warned Kobes about overcrowding, and the train’s conduc-tor, instead of helping the bewildered reporter, simply shouted, ‘if you really want to board, well then go ahead!’4 Once he had squeezed on, Kobes found himself ‘hurdling’ over luggage and people and scaling ‘barricades of luggage, rubbish, pillows, bedding, broken bottles, sacks, boxes and even a [blind] old man’. Kobes described his ‘safari’ as an adventure of climbing, twisting and turning and, above all else, dodging a mass of humanity—men, women and children of all ages—who had ‘strained expressions’ while trying ‘to sit with at least some part of their bodies’.5

Kobes’s initial questions and subsequent article highlight the various ways ‘guest-worker’ transport was logistically problematic. In his article, Kobes pointedly compares the state of the ‘guest-worker’ train with a train for Germans, noting that, just before the ‘Guest-worker Express’ arrived, he had witnessed the punctual departure of a ‘German train’ with passengers stretched out in comfort. But Kobes’s critique goes beyond the logistical with an uncomfortable historical allusion—comparing guest-worker

* This article derives from a broader book project on Postwar Negotiations: The First Generation of Turkish

‘Guest-workers’. The research towards the article was made possible by the German Academic Exchange Service,

the Freie Universität/GSA Berlin Programme for Advanced German and European Studies, the American Institute

for Research in Turkey, the Princeton University Office of Population Research, the Institute of Turkish Studies,

and the Rutgers Graduate School of New Brunswick. I owe thanks for the astute and insightful comments of

the anonymous readers, which greatly improved the essay, as well as to Belinda Davis, Jochen Hellbeck, Temma

Kaplan, Micheal Meng, Derrick Miller, Nicholas Schlosser, Gillian Glaes and Thomas Jordan.

1 ‘Notbremse im Hellas-Istanbul Expreß’, Salzburger Nachrichten, no. 17 (28 Jun 1969), BArch B 119/ 4030.

Salzburger Nachrichten is known as a centre-right, Christian Liberal paper.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

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On Track for West Germany: Turkish ‘Guest-worker’ Rail Transportation 551

trains to ‘cattle transport’.6 His report is an example of the international media’s gaze trained on postwar West Germany’s dubious arrangement for foreign labour transporta-tion.7 Kobes used his observations to show the public the dire conditions on the train and, in so doing, to prod national rail authorities into addressing them. And yet, Kobes’s report fails to reveal that West German officials actually were aware of and even fret-ting in internal memos over how to manage their unwieldy transportation problems humanely and efficiently, particularly in light of Germany’s recent troubling past.

Such media reports were also unable to explain how, just a year later in 1970, almost one and a half million Turkish workers were waiting to depart for West Germany on these very trains, a journey that would transform individuals into ‘guest-workers’.8 The ‘Guest-Worker’ Programme was immensely popular among applicants, and for-mer workers often describe their initial departure for West Germany with excitement, contrary to the dominance in the scholarly literature of miserable experiences.9 This curious constellation of factors demonstrates the particularities of the ‘Guest-Worker’ Programme’s complex, human experiences that defy standard narratives.

West Germany’s ‘Guest-Worker’ Programme recruited and imported foreign workers for short-term employment between 1955 and 1973. During this time postwar labour migration was commonplace across Western Europe. (Estimates note that upwards of 30 million European and non-European labour migrants relocated to European indus-trial centres in the 1960s and 1970s).10 Bilateral treaties between the Federal Republic

6 West German and German Rail officials continued to use terms such as ‘Transport’ to refer to guest-worker trans-

portation, even though, for some, the term had a negative and historically-loaded connotation, because it was

the same term used to describe trains travelling to concentration and extermination camps. For recent scholarship

on the use of train transportation during the Holocaust see, Simone Gigliotti, The Train Journey (New York, 2009);

Todd Samuel Presner, Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains (New York, 2007). For a look at the intersections

between mechanized technology, corporate power and modernized space see, Barbara Young Welke, Recasting

American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865–920 (New York, 2001).

7 Guest-worker transportation received much press coverage: a BBC film crew even travelled with Turkish workers from

Istanbul to West Germany to make a documentary. The filmmakers noted, ‘to be able to travel with the Turkish work-

ers on their train was one of the most important factors in the success of the film. Only then could we really observe

first hand the realities of the men leaving their country for a new job and life in Germany ... We were highly impressed

with the handling of vast numbers of potential and actual workers ... The film will be shown here in October’, Sue

Pugh, BBC TV, London, to Herr Karl Maibaum, Bundesanstalt für Arbeit, Nürnberg, 7 Jun 1973 BArch, B119/ 4029;

see also, Deutsche Botschaft, Ankara, an das Auswärtiges Amt, Bonn, ‘Stellungnahme der türkischen Presse zu dem

Ausgang der Gespräche der deutschen-türkischen Gemischten Kommission’, which mentions the growing amount of

Turkish press coverage on Turkish guest-workers in Germany, 16 May 1968 BArch B119/ 3074.

8 Ahmet Aker, ‘A Study of Turkish Labour Migration to Germany’, Institute of Foreign Policy Research: The Johns

Hopkins University Bologna Centre School of Advanced International Studies, no. 10 (July 1974).

9 Important early work empathetically exposed guest-workers’ miserable conditions, though such depictions have

also effaced complex human experiences: see, inter alia, John Berger and Jenn Mohr, A Seventh Man: Migrant

Workers in Europe (New York, 1975); Inga Steinen, Leben zwischen zwei Welten: Türkische Frauen in Deutschland

(Berlin, 1994); Gunter Wallraff, Ganz Unten (Köln, 1985); Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Angst essen Seele auf

(Tango-Film, Munich, 1974), Feo Aladağ, Die Fremde (ARTE, Independent Artists Filmproduktion, RBB, WDR, 2010).

10 Rainer Ohliger, Karen Schönwälder and Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos, European Encounters: Migrants, Migration

and European Societies since 1945 (Burlington, VT, 2003), pp. 4–5. For connections between Germany’s Nazi

past and the guest-worker programme, see Ulrich Herbert and Karin Hunn, ‘Guest-workers and Policy on

Guest-workers in the Federal Republic: From the Beginning of Recruitment in 1955 until its Halt in 1973’, in Hanna

Schissler (ed.), The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949–1968 (Princeton, 2001), pp. 187–

218; Jan Motte, Rainer Ohliger and Anne von Oswald (eds), 50 Jahre Bundesrepublik, 50 Jahre Einwanderung:

Nachkriegsgeschichte als Migrationsgeschichte (Frankfurt/Main, 1999).



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552 Jennifer A. Miller

of Germany and applicant countries arranged for approved applicants to be trans-ported to, housed in and employed in West Germany for a period of two years.11 As former colonial subjects and refugees from the now-Soviet East travelled to European metropolises in this same period, and in the process negotiated their membership in their new West European locations, guest-workers also transitioned during this trip into participants in industrialized postwar Western Europe. Furthermore, in a fraught post-war era, West Germany set out to recruit foreign workers. What was originally intended as a temporary labour migration elicited the permanent settlement of ethnic Turks in West Germany, sparking a decades-long debate over their integration into a country that, many initially argued, was exclusive, not historically ‘meant for immigration’,12 and was also struggling with the recent war’s legacy and division.

Three-fifths of Germany’s current ‘migration-background population’13 stems from the guest-worker application countries of the 1950s and 1960s; the largest ethno-linguistic group among them were ethnic Turks.14 Turkish guest-worker appli-cants are not significant solely because they formed the majority of migrants, but also because they have come to represent the entire ‘foreign Other’ in the Federal Republic. Journalists and policy makers use the terms ‘Turks’, ‘foreigners’ and ‘guest-workers’ interchangeably in troubling ways. Anthropologist Levent Soysal has written, ‘Turks ... appear as perpetual guest-workers, arrested in a state of cultural and social liminal-ity ... In public, popular and scholarly discourses, Turkish migrants appear, at best, as relentless advocates of revitalized Turkishness or Islam, or, at worst, as essentially unassimilable agents of foreignness’.15 Scholars have mirrored this trend with similarly broad categories such as Gastarbeiterliteratur or ‘guest-worker literature’. Scholars have used literature to access the guest-worker experience, primary because it is the most accessible, often translated into German, and yet actual guest-workers were rarely the audience or authors of Gastarbeiterliteratur.

More recently, in addition to representing the foreign ‘Other’, ethnic Turks became the ‘Muslim Other’: instead of counting how many foreigners were living in Germany, statisticians began specifically counting Muslims in Germany. (In 2000, the number

11 Employers frequently ignored the two-year limit, leading the majority of workers to stay on indefinitely. Barbara

Sonnenberger, ‘Verwaltete Arbeitskraft: Die Anwerbung von “Gastarbeiter”, den 1950er und 1960er Jahren’, in

Jochen Oltmer (ed.), Migration Steuern und Verwalten (IMIS Schriften, 12, Göttingen, 2003), pp. 145–76, here,

p. 160; See also Jamin, ‘Die deutsch-türkischen Anwerbevereinbarung von 1961 und 1964’; idem and Aytaç

Eryılmaz (eds), Fremde Heimat: eine Geschichte der Einwanderung aus der Türkei (Essen, 1998), pp. 69–82, here

p. 82.

12 Klaus J. Bade ended this debate with his research designed to prove that Germany was indeed and had always

been a land of immigration, a concept that scholars and policy makers alike now accept. Klaus J. Bade, Europa in

Bewegung: Migration vom späten 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (Munich, 2000).

13 The German Micro Census collected data on the category ‘of migration background’ for the first time in

2005; ‘Leichter Anstiege der Bevölkerung mit Migrationshintergrund’, Press Release No. 105/2008–2003–11,

Statistisches Bundesamt Deutschland, www.destatis.de/jetspeed/portal/cms/Sites/destatis/Internet/DE/Presse/

pm/2008/03/PD08__105__12521,templateId=renderPrint.psml (accessed 4 July 2011).

14 Rita Süssmuth, Klaus J. Bade, Christoph Kannengießer, Gerd Landsberg, Heinz Putzhammer and Gert

G. Wagner (eds), Migration und Integration Erfahrungen nutzen, Neues wagen: Jahresgutachten 2004 des

Sachverständigenrates für Zuwanderung und Integration, Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge (Nürnberg,

2004), pp. 94–5.

15 Levent Soysal, ‘Labor to Culture: Writing Turkish Migration to Europe’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 102, 2/3 (2003),

pp. 491–506, here p. 493.



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of Muslims in Germany lay between 2.8 and 3.2 million, according to a Bundestag inquiry, increasing the importance of categorizing ‘foreigners’ along ethno-religious lines.16) Though religion was never a factor in regulating guest-worker or refugee status prior to 2001, political officials have begun conflating religion with other cultural traits used to classify groups as ‘worthy’ or ‘incapable’ of integration.17 Scholars have per-haps overlooked the specificity of the German-Turkish guest-worker case, especially the invitational aspect, as other waves of Muslim minority migrants have entered Europe (for example, into France, where authorities and society in general saw them as prob-lems from the beginning).18 In sum, contemporary debates have eclipsed the history of the original programme, plans, implementation and participants, flattening diverse foreign populations into fictional wholes and losing sight of individuals and, in their crucial early history, the transculturation where new relationships were both forged and negotiated—a trend this research seeks to reverse.19

Language and national barriers have also hindered a comprehensive narrative of guest-worker recruitment, transportation and housing. Archival research in different countries and multiple languages has often been splintered and left to disciplines other than history. This essay begins with sources gathered in multiple languages and coun-tries, from federal and private archives and oral history interviews, and from official intergovernmental documents. This research aims to fill out our understanding of the everyday social conditions and move the narrative towards a multi-dimensional and truly transnational account.

Scholarly literature of postwar foreign labour in West Germany often begins with nar-ratives of arrival in West German train stations, overlooking how these immigrants actually got there, implying that one first became a guest-worker in West Germany.20 This study argues that the process began even earlier and that the train journey itself was an important site of ‘becoming a guest-worker’. Train travel functioned as a symbol of economic recov-ery and dynamism in West Germany, in contrast to Turkey’s stagnation, just as train travel

16 Deutscher Bundestag, ‘Islam in Deutschland’, Bundesdrucksache 14/4530, quoted in Joyce Mushaben, The

Changing Faces of Citizenship: Integration and Mobilization among Ethnic Minorities in Germany (New York,

2008), p. 151.

17 Hans-Ulrich Wehler, ‘Das Türkenproblem: Der Westen braucht die Türkei—etwa als as Frontstaat gegen den Irak.

Aber in die EU darf das muslimische Land niemals’, Die Zeit, 38 (9 Sep. 2002).

18 Gillian Glaes emphasizes how France’s role as a colonial power in West Africa impacted the reception of these

immigrants in France after 1960. Gillian Glaes, ‘Policing the Post-Colonial Order: Surveillance and the African

Immigrant Community in France, 1960–1979’, Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques, 36 (Summer 2010),

pp. 108–26.

19 According to the Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge, a main result of the labour migration of the 1960s

was the development of a large Muslim population in Germany, which numbers 3 million today and prompted the

establishment of accompanying religious organizations, which, especially since 11 Sept. 2001, have often been

politically misinterpreted.

20 Historians of guest-workers in West Germany often begin with a train station motif. See, Klaus J. Bade and Jochen

Oltmer (eds), Zuwanderung und Integration in Niedersachsen seit dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Osnabrück, 2002); Rita

Chin, The ‘Guest-worker’ Question in Postwar Germany (New York, 2007); Karin Hunn, ‘Nächstes Jahr kehren wir

zurück ...’ Die Geschichte der türkischen “Gastarbeiter” in der Bundesrepublik (Göttingen, 2005). Also the recent

film, Almanya: Willkommen in Deutschland, shows a Turkish guest-worker deciding to go to West Germany,

boarding the back of a pickup truck in Turkey and then stepping into a West German train station after arrival

(Almanya, Willkommen in Deutschland, dir. Yasemin Şamdereli, Roxy, Infa, Concord, 2011).



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has historically stood for modernity and progress.21 For critics, train travel was problem-atic, functioning as an enduring symbol of Germany’s dark historical legacy. For travelling workers, however, train travel symbolized opportunity, hope and adventure. This rail travel was, as New Labor historians would argue, an important site of working-class creation: upon arrival, these individuals stepped off the train as guest-workers.22 In the case pre-sented here, the three-day train ride to West Germany was a crucial step in the develop-ment of a larger, classed and homogenizing experience: even prior to boarding applicants had successfully to manœuvre a year-long application process, vocational testing, multiple medical exams, various appointments and tedious visa applications. The train trip con-tinued this process of orientation for life in West Germany: applicants clung to goals of success and adventure in spite of over-crowded, dirty, frigid and, at times, inhumane trains, setting the stage for a fifty-year coexistence of Turks and Germans.

This article begins with the historical moment when West Germany extended an invitation to foreigner workers—workers they viewed as ‘solutions’ not as ‘problems’—and focuses on the very group (ethnic Turks) whose legacy and historicization within Germany has changed the most over the last 50 years. It examines the individuals, inter alia travelling applicants and intergovernmental officials, who were impacted on both sides of this nascent, postwar, transnational labour migration, and interrogates the standard narratives with guest-workers’ own excitement, expectations and recol-lections. The following sections track the careful planning of West German officials, the plan’s unravelling and the careful negotiations between both the German past and individual workers’ own construction of new social identities.

I: Careful Planning Breaks Down

The Istanbul Liaison Office of the West German Employment Bureau (Bundesanstalt für Arbeitsvermittlung und Arbeitslosenversicherung or BA) painstakingly debated every aspect of worker transportation to West Germany—from calories in the travel provisions to the number of train seats, recording minutia in their files. At exactly 6:33pm on 26 September 1961, the first official group of Turkish guest-workers arrived at Munich Central

21 Karen Schönwälder writes that West Germans could feel ‘nationalistic’ and ‘superior’ by recruiting thousands of

foreign workers, ‘as evidence of their own economic superiority, of their role as a leading civic force in Europe

and even as political educators’ in ‘West German Society and Foreigners in the 1960s’, in Philipp Gassert and

Alan Steinweis (eds), Coping with the Nazi Past: West German Debates on Nazism and Generational Conflict,

1955–1975 (New York, 2006), p. 115. For the historical legacy of train travel as part of modernity see Steven Kern,

The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, 1986); Angela Woollacott, ‘“All This Is the Empire, I told

Myself”: Australian Women’s Voyages “Home” and the Articulation of Colonial Whiteness’, American Historical

Review 102, 4 (1997), pp. 1003–29.

22 Proponents of ‘New Labor History’ have argued for a move away from the ‘shop floor’ in order to understand

the development of working-class experience. David Brody, ‘The Old Labor History and the New: In Search of the

American Working Class’, Labor History, 20 (Winter 1979), pp. 111–26; in this classic essay, Brody asks labour

historians to look beyond the workplace to capture the American working-class experience; see also In Labor’s

Cause: Main Themes on the History of the American Worker (New York, 1993) and E.P. Thomspon, The Making of

the English Working Class (Vintage, 1963), that argues that class is a cultural formation. While ‘New labor history’

is no longer ‘new’, its application to Turkish guest-workers remains novel. For a look at New Labor History and the

reinforcement of racial stereotypes, see David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the

American Working Class (New York, 1999).



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Station—a group of 68 workers, headed to the Ford Factory in Cologne.23 (Indeed a full two weeks in advance, BA officials noted that this train would arrive at exactly 6:33pm.) From detailed travel plans calculated to the minute, to packing instructions planned to the gram, the BA’s intentions were clear: a precise, orderly and efficient importation of a very large group of workers. The BA was certainly not indifferent to its recruits.

Detailed travel instructions demonstrated the BA’s concern for its workers. I’m going to Germany, an instructional pamphlet distributed to recruits, stated that trains would depart to West Germany daily from Istanbul at 1pm, the trip would last 44 hours and the trains would arrive in Munich at 8:30am.24 A different pamphlet, How to Go to Germany, laid out the details of workers’ packing allowances, down to how many olives and cheese (one kilo) and how many cigarettes (10 cartons) were allowed.25 It is diffi-cult to know how officials distributed these instructions, how many workers had access to them and how many actually read them; one contemporary study noted that only 58% of workers recalled such instructions.26 Nevertheless, the pamphlets demonstrate a striking attention to detail. The BA also invested a great deal of time and money in securing nutritionally appropriate provisions (1,111.4 calories).27 A state laboratory in Munich even tested the nutritional, satiation and germ values of provisions.28 (Various West German firms also courted the lucrative deal of supplying the provisions.29) After the inaugural trip in September 1961, the official travel provisions included:

150–200 grams of cooked mutton, 150–200 grams of ground beef meatballs, 100 grams of baked mut-ton liver, 1 kilo Turkish bread, 1 pear, 1 apple and 500 grams of grapes, 2 small green cucumbers and 20 olives, 60 grams of cheese, 2 hard-boiled eggs, 2 tomatoes, 3 yeast pastries, rice-stuffed grape leaves and, for drinking water, two 10-litre containers that could be filled.30

23 This is largely cited as being the first transport of Turkish guest-workers to West Germany organized by the

German Liaison Office, however, unlike later group-trips, it was organized by the Fäustel Travel Agency in Istanbul,

Bundesanstalt für Arbeitsvermittlung und Arbeitslosenversicherung (BAVAV) Holjewilken Nürnberg 14 Okt 1961,

BArch B 119/ 4035.

24 Münir Egeli, Almanya’ya Gidiyorum (Bonn, 1962), p. 28. The pamphlet also lists departure days and times for air

routes to West Germany, though until 1970, train travel was far more common.

25 İşçi Olarak Almanya’ya Nasıl Gidilir? İş ve İşçi Bulma Kurumu Genel Müdürlüğü Yayınları, No 28 (Ankara, 1963), p. 16.

26 In her study of the conditions and problems of Turkish workers in West Germany, Abadan-Unat noted that

58% of those she interviewed said that they did not read instructional materials before departure or after

arrival. This statement makes it unclear if workers actually received the materials or if they were choosing to

ignore them. Nermin Abadan-Unat, Studie über die Lage und die Probleme der Türkischen Gastarbeiter in der

Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Kurze Zusammenfassung (Türkische Republik Ministerpräsidium Staatssekretariat für

Wirtschaftsplanung, Ankara, 1964, 6 Okt. 1964 BArch, B 119/ 3073).

27 For example, an arrival packet in Southern Bavaria contained exactly 1,111.4 calories. Landesarbeitsamt Südbayern,

‘Verpflegung der ausländischen Arbeiter in der Weiterleitungsstelle’, 1963 BArch B 119/ 4032.

28 ‘Der Nähr- und Sättigungswert der Lebensmittel kann als ausreichend bezeichnet werden. Mit Ausnahme

der Wurst keine Beanstandungen in hygienischer und qualitativer Hinsicht’. Istanbul, 13 Dez. 1964,

Bundesanstalt für Arbeitsvermittlung und Arbeitslosenversicherung, Deutsche Verbindungsstelle in der Türkei,

An den Herrn Präsidenten der Bundesanstalt für Arbeitsvermittlung und Arbeitslosenversicherung; Betr:

Transportangelegenheiten; hier: Reiseproviant; BArch B 119/ 4035.

29 BAVAV Nürnberg, ‘Bericht des VAm Krusch über die Dienstreise nach Belgrad zwecks Beobachtung eines

Sonderzug-Transportes Istanbul-München’, 11 Nov. 1963 BArch B 119/4035; Istanbul, BAVAV Türkei an BAVAV

Nürnberg, ‘ Reiseproviant’, 13 Dez. 1964 BArch B 119 / 4035. This memo noted that one firm was so eager to

secure the deal with the Employment Bureau that they reportedly offered gold watches to officials and their wives.

30 BAVAV Nürnberg Holjewilken, ‘Anwerbung und Vermittlung türkischer Arbeitskräfte; hier Eintreffen der 1. und

2. Sammelfahrt mit türkischen Arbeitskräften in München-Hbf’, 14 Okt. 1961 BArch B 119/ 4035.



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In another demonstration of concern, the travel escort for the trip requested additional provisions and noted that it would be more appropriate to offer, instead of coffee, ‘a thinned yogurt drink’ after arrival, referring to the common Turkish drink, Ayran.31 (The yogurt drink was unknown in Germany, as signified by several hand-written exclamation points next to the request.)32 Cultural considerations of palate and dietary restrictions demonstrated West German officials’ commitment to addressing more than just the functional aspects of the trip to West Germany.

On paper, officials also showed great concern about what was in workers’ bag-gage. In their internal memos, for example, German and Austrian customs offi-cials were apprehensive about the threat foreign sausages posed.33 German Rail repeatedly requested that the BA remind workers before departure, especially if they were Turkish, that they could not bring foreign meat products into West Germany.34 Internal reports also emphasize that customs officials would stop and thoroughly inspect all trains at the border, which would take hours if guest-workers could not curb their ‘unusually large amounts’ of baggage and foodstuffs.35 Often, such threats were idle: the reporter, Kobes, noted that an Austrian customs offi-cial had told him that it simply took too much time to ‘climb over the barricade of luggage in the aisles’ and that the resulting delays would be ‘unbearable’.36 In other cases, travelling workers tried to take advantage of the situation to smug-gle goods past customs officials, though they were not always successful. Customs officials discovered tobacco, spirits, carpets, huge sacks of potatoes and an entire train-compartment’s worth of tanned hides that guest-workers were trying to bring with them.37

To further complicate matters, BA officials who managed the departure from Istanbul did not necessarily enforce their own official baggage guidelines. One official noted that it was his policy to have passengers occupy fifty seats and leave twelve seats per car for luggage.38 There was leeway in baggage storage, he argued, because ‘not every Turkish worker packed alike’. Workers coming from Anatolia, he explained (who

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid.

33 In interviews, former workers reported packing food for the trip that including the Turkish garlic-flavoured sausage,

sucuk, see Documentation Centre and Museum of Migration in Germany (DOMiT) interview 16, ‘Filiz’, 31 Aug.

1995; DOMiT Interview 62, ‘Metin’, 1995; DOMiT interview 39, ‘Yalcın’, 19 Oct. 1995; See also ‘Ungenehmigte

Einfuhr von Fleisch- und Wurstwaren durch ausländische Arbeitnehmer’, BArch B 119/ 4029. Apparently the

Minister for Nutrition, Farming and Forestry wrote to the Employment Bureau in Nuremberg to remind them that

‘the introduction of forbidden meat products’ from Turkey and Greece should be stopped.

34 ‘Betref: Transporte neuangeworbener griechischer und türkischer Arbeiter nach Deutschland’, 15 Mär. 1967

BArch B119/ 4029.

35 ‘Betr: Besuch der Weiterleitungsstelle im Hauptbahnhof München am 14 Jan. 1963’, 24 Jan. 1963 BArch B 119/

4032.

36 ‘Notbremse im Hellas-Istanbul Expreß’, Salzburger Nachrichten BArch B 119/ 4030.

37 BAVAV Nürnberg, an Herrn Präs. Landesarbeitsamtes Südbayern, München, 16 Jan. 1962; Deutsches Zollamt

Salzburg an BAVAV Nürnberg, 23 Nov. 1967 BArch B 119/ 4031.

38 BAVAV Türkei an BAVAV Nürnberg, Betr: Transportangelegenheiten, hier, Das zu reichlich mitgeführte Gepäck

türk. Arbeitnehmer, Die Nutzung von Sitzplätzen zur Gepäckbeförderung, Die Verschmutzung der Sonderzüge,15

Mai 1964 BArch B 119/ 4035.



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were about 30% to 50% of passengers) tended to carry a bag or small sack, while only 40% of them carried a suitcase.39 On the other hand, workers from Istanbul appar-ently averaged two suitcases apiece.40 More than just causal about the regulations, this official was sympathetic to the fact that workers needed to pack clothes for an entire year: ‘Many of the Turks are in no position to spend the money they have earned in Germany for clothes’, he noted, ‘[especially] when they would rather use it to take care of their families in Turkey’.41

Even when certain BA officials were culturally literate and considered the par-ticularities of this transnational and transcultural migration, travelling workers remained largely unaware of plans made at desks. Quite the contrary, they recount chaotic scenes and confusion at both the BA liaison office and at the departure point, where appointments were ignored and a man simply used a megaphone to shout instructions to thousands of workers waiting in line. One former worker, Erol, recalled that instead of calling workers with appointments, the man with the megaphone called company names: ‘to the Bremen something factory’, Erol para-phrased, ‘to the dockyards ... to Opel in Rüsselheim, to Volkswagen in Wolfsburg, to Mercedes and so on and so forth’.42 Even though Erol had already been assigned a position at Siemens and was ready and waiting to leave, the Siemens management did not take him, because they had apparently already filled their personnel quota. Erol had quit his job, travelled to Istanbul and gone through a year-long application process, only for Siemens to turn him away at the point of departure. Erol’s exam-ple demonstrates that employers were also working around procedures, in which the BA mandated that workers be selected and ordered based on their skill-set and ‘appropriateness’.43

Many of the everyday aspects of guest-worker travel were simply out of the BA’s and applicants’ control. First, there were simply too many people: BA officials accepted the majority of applicants, approximately 70% of those who applied, and arranged their transportation to West Germany either through the Istanbul or Ankara BA Branch. About 640,000 Turkish men and women applied at either the Istanbul Office (1961–1973) or, additionally, at the Ankara office (1963–1967).44 From 1961 to 1973, around 866,000 Turkish workers came to West Germany; up until 1970, three-quarters came by officially organized train ‘transports’.45 Second, the BA faced the additional thorny situation of moving workers across borders and having to work

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid.

42 DOMiT Interview 22, ‘Erol’, 12 Oct. 1995.

43 A committee of BA officials would determine an applicant’s departure position by taking into consideration West

German employers’ wishes, the candidate’s age, education, skill-level, physical build and even ‘personal appear-

ance and attitude’. İş ve işçi bulma Kurumu Genel Müdürlüğü Yayınları, İşçi Olarak Almanya’ya Nasıl Gidiler?

Federal Almanya’da Yaşma Şartları, no. 28 (Ankara: Mars Matbaası, 1963), National Library Ankara, 96.

44 Karin Hunn, Nächstes Jahr, 79.

45 Matilde Jamin, ‘Fremde Heimat’, in Motte, Ohliger and von Oswald, 50 Jahre Bundesrepublik; see also idem, ‘Die

deutsche Anwerbung, Organisation und Größenordnung’, in Fremde Heimat, pp. 207–31; Workers were also able to

apply to arrive in West Germany privately and some firms also organized flights for workers; for information on flights

see BAVAV Nuremberg, 19 Mai 1965 BArch B 119/ 4031; see also BAVAV Türkei, 31 Jan. 1972 BArch B 119/ 4029.



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with other national rail administrations, customs officials, and food and water suppli-ers. BA officials could neither standardize transportation nor guarantee that arrange-ments would be carried out as they had planned. National rail administrations, including the German National Rail, were either unable or unwilling to supply trains that could travel from Istanbul all the way to Munich.46 According to an interna-tional agreement, each national rail administration would commit a certain number of coaches for travel through their districts;47 workers would travel part of the trip in one wagon and then change coaches in another country’s station until they reached West Germany.48 Chaos ensued.

Travelling workers bore the brunt of the disorganization: ‘Fight scenes over reserved seats’ was the headline of Rheinische Post in 1965 about a train in which travelling vaca-tioners and foreign guest-workers came to blows over reserved seats.49 In one case, a train travelling from Istanbul to Munich stopped in Belgrade, where workers poured out of the train as soon as it stopped, despite instructions shouted from a megaphone to stay on the train. As a result, twelve Turkish workers were left behind when the train continued shortly thereafter.50 In another case, sixty workers ended up scattered through a train amidst non-guest-worker passengers while a translator tried to ‘round them up’ with a megaphone.51 Workers, especially women, often reported having to stand in the trains due to a lack of reserved seats.52 Officials could rarely guarantee the reserved seats for which they had paid, leading to frustration on all sides.53

National rail administrations also reneged on commitments, making massive delays common.54 By 1964, such notes were familiar: ‘the Yugoslavian train coaches that were meant for today’s planned departure did not arrive again’.55 Moreover, even when

46 Ibid. German Rail officials mention that they would have to have a guarantee from Turkish Rail that they would

be exempt from certain fees in order to arrange transportation. However, there are only vague references to what

these fees are for and what amount they are. Weicken, Nürnberg, Apr1962, BArch B 119/ 4035.

47 ‘Notbremse im Hellas-Istanbul-Expreß’; BAVAV Türkei, Istanbul, 13 Jul. 1964, an BAVAV Nürnberg, BArch

B 119/ 4031.

48 BAVAV Türkei an BAVAV Nürnberg, 12 Sep. 1961, BArch B 119/ 4035; See also, BAVAV Türkei an BAVAV Nürnberg

6 Sep. 1963, ‘Anwerbung und Vermittlung türkischer Arbeitnehmer, hier, Wochenbericht’, BArch B 119/ 4035.

49 ‘Prügelszenen um reservierte Plätze: Bundesbahn ist ratlos: Gastarbeiter blockieren Urlauberzüge’ Rheinische Post,

188 (14 Aug. 1965) BArch B 119/ 4031.

50 Ref. Weicken, ‘Bericht des VAm Krusch über die Dienstreise nach Belgrad zwecks Beobachtung eines

Sonderzug-Transportes Istanbul–München’, BArch B 119 / 4035.

51 Ref Ia6, Weicken, Nürnberg, Apr. 1962 BArch B 119 / 4035.

52 Landesarbeitsamt Südbayern an BAVAV Nürnberg, 11 Dez. 1961 BArch B 119/ 4035; BAVAV Nürnberg, Weicken,

Mär. 1962 BArch B 119/ 4035.

53 Ibid. Officials mention paying the cost of seat reservations, however, it is unclear if they did so for every depart-

ing train; see BAVAV Türkei an BAVAV Nürnberg, 12 Aug. 1963 BArch B 119/ 4035; see also BAVAV Türkei,

an BAVAV Nürnberg, 23 Aug. 1963 BArch B 119/ 4035; Another memo mentions that it was not possible to

reserve seats for non-German trains: ‘Platzkarten können nicht ausgegeben werden (kein Platzkartenverfahren

mit Jugoslawien, Griechenland und der Türkei). Für eine ordnungsgemäße Durchführung der Transporte (für alle

Kräfte sind Plätze in einem Wagen vorhanden) müssen Wagen der Deutschen Bundesbahn eingesetzt werden’.

Ref Weicken, Nürnberg, Apr. 1962, BArch B 119/ 4035.

54 BAVAV Türkei an BAVAV Nürnberg 1 Apr. 1964 BArch B119/ 4035.

55 BAVAV Nürnberg, 13 Apr. 1964 BArch B119/ 4035. See also, ‘Bundesvereinigung der Deutschen

Arbeitgeberverbände, Köln, an die Mitglieder des Ausschusses ‘Ausländische Arbeitskräfte’, 30 Okt. 1969 BArch

B 119/ 4036 I, which notes that working with Yugoslavian rail caused particular problems.



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trains did arrive as planned, the number of coaches and seats could range widely, for example from 824 to 912 seats.56 Problems with arranging workers’ timely departure from Istanbul continued for years,57 and as late as 1970, workers could change trains and find no coaches waiting for them, resulting in a ‘catastrophe’, in which workers were required to crowd into coaches already full, and stand the rest of the way to Munich.58 In other cases, Yugoslavian rail employees would take Turkish workers out of their designated coaches in Belgrade and distribute them in the remaining coaches, forcing BA officials to search for them individually on the train platform in Munich.59 Or the Yugoslavian police would co-opt a guest-worker train for their own purposes, insisting that their passengers be accommodated on already full trains.60 The BA noted with frustration that other countries’ officials were ‘not innocent’, causing problems.61 The BA had planned for efficiency, yet circumstances proved out of their control and travelling workers gathered repeatedly negative impressions of their handling.

The political and Cold War borders constantly reminded travelling Turkish workers of their dependence on West Germany for westward travel, another condition that consolidated their new status as a guest-worker. West German officials had to negotiate entry for Turkish workers to the other countries along the way in a Cold War con-text that could not be ignored. From time to time, foreign police thoroughly searched guest-worker trains, reportedly looking for ‘refugees’.62 Additionally, foreign consulates were hardly designed to process the vast amounts of paperwork necessary to secure travel visas for such a large population; visa delays were so bad that they could cause an entire trip to be cancelled.63 (In 1962, the Bulgarian and Yugoslavian consulates could only process twenty-five visas a day, creating a huge bottleneck of waiting workers in Istanbul.64) The visa delays caused up to three trains to be cancelled per week—at the very time when the German Liaison Office in Istanbul was trying to increase workers’ departures. The BA appealed to the visa offices to treat Turkish guest-workers as an

56 ‘Die beiden Leerzüge sind pünktlich eingetroffen. Sie führten allerdings einmal 14 und das andere Mal nur 12

Wagen mit. Infolge Verspätung des fahrplanmäßigen Yugoslavienexpress konnten die Sonderzüge erst um 21

[Uhr] bereitgestellt werden.’ BAVAV Deutsche Verbindungsstelle in der Türkei, An den Herrn Präsidenten der

BAVAV Nürnberg; 24 Jul 1964; Betr: Anwerbung und Vermittlung türkischer Arbeitskräfte nach der Bundesrepublik

Deutschland, hier Wochenbericht für die Zeit vom 17–23 Jul. 1964; BAVAV Türkei an BAVAV Nürnberg, ‘Betr:

Transportangelegenheiten’ 1 Apr. 1964 BArch B119/ 4035.

57 Bundesvereinigung der Deutschen Arbeitgeberverbände, Köln, ‘Tätigkeit der Deutschen Anwerbekommissionen

in Istanbul, Athen und Belgrad’, 30 Okt. 1969 BArch B 119/ 4036 I.

58 BAVAV to Deutschen Bundesbahn, ‘Transportangelegenheiten ausländischer Arbeitnehmer’, 19 Jan. 1970 BArch

B 119/4031; see also Ref. Weicken, Holkewilken Nürnberg, Mär. 1962 BArch B 119/ 4035.

59 Landsarbeitsamt Südbayern an BAVAV Nürnberg 11 Dez. 1961 BArch B 119/ 4035; See also Ref. Weicken,

Holkewilken Nürnberg, Mär. 1962 BArch B 119/ 4035.

60 ‘Während der Fahrt durch Jugoslawien verlangte die jugoslawische Bahnpolizei an einer Haltestelle die Mitnahme

von zwei Jugoslawen in dem Sonderzug bis nach Zagreb. Das jugoslawische Zugbegleitpersonal weigerte sich und

suchte Unterstützung bei der Transportleitung. Die Polizei bestand darauf, die zwei Personen mitfahren zu lassen;

Sitzplätze wurden nicht in Anspruch genommen’. Ref. Weicken, Nürnberg, 11 Nov 1963 BArch B 119/ 4035.

61 ‘Die Eisenbahnverwaltungen der Durchfahrtsländer [sind] nicht unschuldig’, ibid.

62 Ref. Weicken, Nürnberg, 11 Nov. 1963 ‘Bericht des VAm Krusch über die Dienstreise nach Belgrad zwecks

Beobachtung eines Sonderzug-Transportes Istanbul-München’, BArch B 119/ 4035.

63 BAVAV Türkei to BAVAV Nürnberg, 12 Apr. 1962 BArch BA 119/ 4035.

64 BAVAV Türkei 12 Apr. 1962 an BAVAV Nürnberg BArch BA 119/ 4035; See Also BAVAV Türkei an BAVAV Nürnberg,

11 Okt. 1963 which notes that around 2,000 people were awaiting departure from Istanbul, BArch B 119/ 4035.



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exception ‘to minimise the negative impact on the West German economy’.65 The visa delays caused more than a bottleneck in Istanbul; they also affected workers’ ability to make transfers to their final destinations upon arrival in West Germany. Delayed depar-tures often caused unplanned weekend arrivals, when employers’ representatives were rarely available.66 As a result, many workers spent their first night in West Germany in Munich Central Station.67 One official noted:

The trains that arrive in Munich extremely delayed cause foreign workers to reach their final destina-tions after midnight. According to state-level employment office reports, this [late arrival] has led to great difficulties ... I think it is necessary that the passengers who would reach final destinations after Munich between the hours of 1 and 5 am as a rule should spend the night in the transfer station. The frequent train delays call for a revision of the distribution of arrival and provisions.68

In hindsight the amount of detail in both travellers’ instructions and internal memos about guest-worker travel is noteworthy, considering that officials could not even guar-antee all workers a seat on the train to West Germany, much less tackle the thornier issues of borders, visa processing and the resulting delays. Workers ultimately bore the discomforts of these disorganized trips, regardless of the cause, and were among the first passengers to traverse the new Cold War borders. Their entrance into the West German ‘economic miracle’ was riddled with irony.

I.1: Material Conditions and ResponsesNot privy to the BA’s angry letter exchanges, workers experienced the trip as it hap-pened and drew their own conclusions. Travelling workers could not possibly have prepared for the difficult journey to West Germany, as detailed instructions from the BA could not address unpredictable logistical problems or poor conditions. ‘The trip was like a cattle transport’, a former worker, Yalcın, noted, ‘Everyone was nervous. No one knew the language. There was a translator who was watching over the whole train and acting like a Commissar, [saying] don’t get up; stay in your seats ... ‘69 Another worker, Filiz, recalled poor provisions, ‘It was a three-day [train] trip ... [Our food] was a package that had canned goods ... but there were no can openers. It was terribly planned’.70 Having already completed a tedious, year-long application process, work-ers endured the three-day train ride under horrific and exhausting conditions. Despite efforts to make the transition to West Germany as smooth as possible and to address

65 The German Liaison Office in Istanbul requested that special consideration be taken of the backed-up situation in

Turkey because it could ‘affect the West German economy’: ‘Die Verbindungsstelle bittet daher im Hinblick auf die

besonders gelagerten Verhältnisse in der Türkei, die Transporte von hier im Interesse der deutschen Wirtschaft so

abfertigen zu können, wie sie anfallen’. BAVAV Türkei an BAVAV Nürnberg, 12 Apr. 1962 BArch BA 119/ 4035.

66 Weicken, Nürnberg, 13 Apr 1962 BArch B 119/ 4035; see also BAVAV, Nürnberg, ‘Übernachtung und Verpflegung

von Transportteilnehmern in der Weiterleitungsstelle–Bahnhofsbunker–München’, 11 Mär. 1963 BArch B119/

4032.

67 Ref. Weicken, ‘Vermittlung qualifizierter türkischer Arbeitnehmer nach der Bundesrepublik Deutschland’,

Nürnberg, notes that Saturday and Sunday arrivals mean that Turkish workers have to spend the night in Munich

train station, 13 Apr. 1962 BArch B 119/ 4035.

68 BAVAV, Nürnberg, ‘Anwerbung und Vermittlung ausländischer Arbeitnehmer nach der Bundesrepublik

Deutschland; hier: Übernachtung und Verpflegung von Transportteilnehmern in der Weiterleitungsstelle–

Bahnhofsbunker–München’, 11 Mär. 1963 BArch B119/ 4032.

69 DOMiT Interview 39, ‘Yalcın’, 19 Oct. 1995.

70 DOMiT Interview 16, ‘Filiz’, 31 Aug. 1995.



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concerns with the West German image in relation to guest-workers, arriving work-ers faced disappointments that coloured future relationships and threatened to tarnish West Germany’s postwar image forever.

The BA Istanbul Liaison Office, not indifferent to material conditions, often distin-guished themselves from the main office in Nuremberg in their concern for travelling workers. Individual officers, who had been living and working in Istanbul for years, worried openly about their applicants. When, due to missing coaches or limited seating capacity, workers could not depart as planned, official BA policy dictated that they be ‘sent home’ and given a new departure date, which could be up to three weeks later.71 However, officers posted in Istanbul reported back to the BA in Nuremberg that appli-cants, especially those from Anatolia, had already travelled long distances to Istanbul (up to 1,700km) and had done so at their own expense, making a ‘return home’ impos-sible.72 During departure delays the Istanbul BA branch sympathetically offered an extra food packet and a small amount of money in compensation.73 One official even demonstrated his familiarity with Istanbul when he stated with apprehension that early morning departures would not work, because the shared taxi (dolmuş) service upon which many depended did not run through the night and would cause workers staying in the outskirts of Istanbul to leave their residences in the afternoon the day before their departure in order to arrive at the train station in time.74 ‘In my opinion’, he noted, ‘it is not reasonable to have Turkish workers [leaving their homes] 8 to 10 hours early so that they then have to wait at the train station an additional 13 to 15 hours’.75 Employment Bureau officials tried to keep the trip to West Germany orderly and humane by paying attention to detail where they could, such as in providing travel instructions, planning travel provisions and organizing trip escorts. However, officials’ inability to translate such attention to detail into practical implementation had consequences.

No other aspect of guest-worker transportation highlighted the confusion over respon-sibility, the Employment Bureau officials’ impotence and the inhumane train conditions for guest-workers more than the train water supplies. German authorities expected that any trains supplied by local rail administrations would naturally have adequate water and clean facilities. The BA notes, ‘Not only is providing water a part of train service, [especially one] that is travelling for 53 hours’, wrote an Istanbul BA official to head-quarters in Nuremberg, ‘but also the cleanliness of the toilet and replenishment of toilet paper and of soap [is expected], just as it is common on every long-distance trip in Germany’.76 However, the problem was that this trip was not in Germany and that this train was des-ignated as a Sonderzug or ‘special train’ only for guest-workers. For drinking water, West German officials in Turkey issued water bottles before departure, instructing passengers

71 BAVAV Türkei an BAVAV Nürnberg, ‘Betr: Transportangelegenheiten’, 1 Apr. 1964, BArch B119/ 4035.

72 Some workers sold their land to come to West Germany, in some cases up to 300 acres. Ali Gitmez, Göçmen

İşçilerin Dönüşü: Return Migration of Turkish Workers to Three Selected Regions (Ankara, 1977), pp. 73, 85, 93;

BAVAV Türkei an BAVAV Nürnberg 12 Apr. 1962.

73 Nürnberg 13 Apr. 1964,BArch B 119/ 4035; See also BAVAV Türkei an BAVAV Nürnberg 4 Sep. 1964 BArch B 119/

4035, where an official notes that 246 workers who could not depart were given 30 Turkish Lira apiece for room

and board for three nights, costing the BAVAV an additional 7,380 Turkish Lira.

74 BAVAV Türkei an BAVAV Nürnberg, 19 Feb. 1964 BArch B 119/ 4035.

75 Ibid.

76 BAVAV Türkei an den Herrn Präsident BAVAV Nürnberg; 15 Mai 1964 BA B 119/ 4035, emphasis mine.



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to fill them before departure and refill them as necessary during the trip.77 Once en route, however, passengers rarely had a chance to refill their water bottles.78 Because so many bureaucracies were involved, there was no easy way to supply water for the trains. ‘Trains that are coming from Bulgaria and Yugoslavia’, an official in Istanbul reported to Nuremberg in 1965, ‘either have no water or only have limited water supplies’.79 Water containers on the trains that passed through the Balkans were not refilled during stops there, even when travel escorts insisted.80 According to the train schedule, train author-ities should have refilled water containers at stops in Svilengrad, Sofia, Beograd, Zagreb and Resenbach.81 The only explanation given as to why the trains were not refilled in the Balkans was that it was a time-consuming process, implying indifference.82 BA officials continually reported problems with water and sanitation as late as 1970.83

While the lack of water caused serious sanitation problems, officials appeared equally concerned about keeping trains clean. BA officials in Nuremberg hired travel escorts (one per 200 applicants) to accompany travelling workers, not only to handle group tickets and logistics, but also to use megaphones to ensure ‘discipline’ and ‘clean-liness’.84 Furthermore, condescension, especially in attempts to regulate behaviour on trains, poisoned the relationship between travelling applicants and their hosts. BA offi-cials distributed paternalistic instructions admonishing passengers not to throw rubbish from train windows, to keep the toilets clean and to be sparing with the water.85 They warned against disembarking en route to ‘get water or to go shopping’ and against

77 On the inaugural trip, 10-litre bottles were issued, presumably to share; starting in 1963, 2-litre bottles were issued

to workers together with their travel provisions, BAVAV Türkei, an BAVAV Nürnberg, 16 Aug. 1963 BArch B 119

/ 4035; BAVAV Nürnberg, 24 Mai 1965 BArch B 119/ 4031; Landesarbeitsamt Südbayern, Der Präsident, An der

Herrn Präsidenten der Bundesanstalt für Arbeit Nürnberg, 9 Apr. 1970 BArch B119 4031.

78 Abteilung I, Nürnberg, ‘Betr: Durchführung der Ausländertransporte’, 24 Mai 1965 BArch B 119/ 4031.

79 ‘Verbesserung im Balkan-Verkehr erst 1966? Die ausländischen Bahnverwaltungen können keine weiteren Züge

übernehmen’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), 228 (1 Oct. 1965) BArch B 119/ 4031. See also a report

from FAZ on 29 Sep. 1966; BAVAV Türkei an den Herrn Präsident BAVAV Nürnberg, 15 Mai 1964 BArch B 119/

4035.

80 ‘BAVAV Türkei, Istanbul, an BAVAV Nürnberg, 13 Jul. 1964 BArch B 119/ 403; BAVAV Nürnberg an BAVAV Türkei,

Griechenland, Spanien, Landesarbeitsamt Südbayern, 4 Aug. 1964 BArch B 119/ 4031.

81 BAVAV Türkei, Istanbul, an BAVAV Nürnberg, 13 Jul. 1964 BArch B 119/ 4031.

82 Weicken, BAVAV Nürnberg 11 Nov. 1963 BArch B 119/ 4035.

83 OBL Süd, 15 Jan. 1964 BArch B 119/ 4035; BAVAV Türkei, Istanbul, an BAVAV Nürnberg, 13 Jul. 1964 BArch

B 119/ 4031; BAVAV Nürnberg, an BAVAV Türkei, Grieschenland, Spanien, Landesarbeitsamt Südbayern,

Landesarbeitsamt Nordrhein-Westfallen, 4 Aug. 1964 BArch B 119/ 4031; BAVAV Nürnberg, 24 Mai 1964

BArch B 119/ 4031; BAVAV Nürnberg, An Deutsche Bundesbahn Oberbetriebsleitung Süd, 18 Jan. 1966 BArch

B 119/ 4031; BA Nürnberg, an Oeftering, Präs. Beutschen Bundesbahn, 19 Jan. 1970, BArch B119/ 4031;

Landesarbeitsamt Hessen, an BA Nürnberg, 6 Mär. 1970 BArch B 119/ 4031; Landesarbeitsamt Südbayern, An BA

Nürnberg, 9 Apr. 1970 BArch B 119/ 4031.

84 BAVAV Türkei an BAVAV Nürnberg, 28 Jan. 1966 BArch B 119/ 4035; BAVAV Nürnberg, an BAVAV Türkei, 20 Jul.

1964 BArch B 119/ 4029; Landesarbeitsamt Südbayern, ‘Merkblatt für Reiseleiter und-begleiter von Sammelreisen

türkischer Arbeitnehmer von Istanbul nach München’, Nov. 1973 BArch B 119/ 4032; BAVAV official, Weicken,

noted that it would be a good idea for escorts to walk the aisles and remind passengers with the megaphone to

be clean. Weicken, Nürnberg, 11 Nov. 1963 BArch B 119/ 4035; see also BAVAV Nürnberg an Landesarbeitsamtes

Südbayern, BAVAV Türkei, 17 Okt. 1966 BArch B 119/ 4029; BAVAV Greichenland an BAVAV Nürnberg, 8 Nov.

1966 BArch B 119/ 4029; BAVAV Greichenland an BAVAV Nürnberg, ‘Transportangelegenheiten griechischer und

türkischer Arbeitnehmer, 8 Nov. 1966 BArch B 119/ 4029.

85 BAVAV Nürnberg, ‘Bitte Sofort Lesen, Wichtige Hinweise für die Fahrt in die Bundesrepublik Deutschland’,

undated, BArch B 119/ 4029.



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damaging doors (by ‘shutting them violently’) or the windows (by boarding through them); passengers were also to stay in their seats and ‘take care of their health’ dur-ing the trip.86 Such instructions were naïve at best when compared to the substandard conditions on the trains.

In one case, when a train arrived in Zagreb, guest-workers ‘stormed’ the train. The escort reported:

in the process, not only the doors, but mainly the windows were used to board. It was an appalling scene, as women and men climbed in like wild animals. It was as if a catastrophe had broken out and everyone wanted to come into the safety of the train.87

The same train was also ‘confused with’ one meant to take Greeks and Yugoslavs who were on vacation back to West Germany; and no one could prevent these additional passengers from also boarding.88 When the German escort tried to address Yugoslavian passengers, who were apparently ‘obtrusive’ to travelling Turkish women, they replied, ‘This is Yugoslavia, you can’t say anything here!’89 During the rest of the trip, the coaches were overstuffed and the aisles filled with luggage and people, just as Kobes had reported. The escort hoped that at the Austrian border, he would be able to have the rail police deal with the extra passengers, but to no avail. Conductors, train police and border police all found it was not ‘worth their while’ to deal with the situation on the train, and the escort, who was the official representative of the West German Employment Office, was only able to observe with horror.90

Despite the well-documented logistical problems, the BA and other administrations not based in Istanbul continued to blame ‘Mediterranean people’ for problems en route. Implicit in the discussions of train sanitation was a commentary on the cleanliness of Turkish workers and of the cultural differences between Turks and Germans more gen-erally. ‘Even though I am aware that some passengers are unfamiliar with the basin toi-let’, replied an Istanbul Employment Official, ‘the blame for the filth cannot be placed solely on the passengers [especially when] ... Sonderzüge [‘special trains’] from Bulgaria and Yugoslavia have absolutely no water or only very little’.91 The Employment Bureau in Nuremberg met with German Rail to improve the conditions on the trains and requested that the water ‘actually be supplied according to plan’, as well as inter alia larger rubbish bins to prevent travellers from throwing their rubbish from the windows of crowded compartments.92 The Employment Bureau continued fruitlessly to pass on to German Rail unanswered requests for water, toilet paper and soap for months.93

Workers suffered because German Rail primarily provided the BA with small, slow, poorly-provisioned local trains, which were hardly appropriate for long-distance travel.

86 Ibid.

87 Ibid.

88 Ibid.

89 Ibid.

90 Ibid. The escort noted that the train was marked in such a way that anyone could see what its purpose was and

that Yugoslavia had such limited train service that everyone wanted to use it.

91 Ibid; German Rail blamed the unsanitary conditions on the trains not only on the duration of the trip but also

on the guest-workers’ ‘South-Eastern-European mentality’, see Deutsche Bundesbahn Bundesbahndirektion

München, an BAVAV Nürnberg, 13 Nov. 1973 BArch B 119/ 4029.

92 BAVAV Nürnberg an BAVAV Türkei, 4 Aug. 1964 BArch B 119/ 4031.

93 BAVAV Nürnberg an die Deutsche Bundesbahn Obertriebsleitung Süd, 6 Nov. 1964 BArch B 119/ 4029.



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German Rail continually offered the slow-moving ‘B3y train’ for guest-worker travel. During the trip, which lasted over fifty hours, the B3y had problems not just with water, but also with heat and light, and a lack of storage space for luggage, and it was also extremely uncomfortable for passengers.94 Workers complained about travelling for three days on bench seats without headrests, which were especially problematic for those sitting in the middle or on an aisle.95 In response, German Rail lamely proposed attaching a headrest, as a ‘comfort improvement’, but it is unclear if this was ever implemented.96 An Istanbul BA official responded with frustration to German Rail’s offerings, ‘When, due to a lack of toilet paper, newspaper and packaging must be used [in the toilet] and there is no water to flush, it is no wonder that the toilets are stopped up and the filth reaches an unimaginable degree. So far, my comments on these problems have hardly had any impact ... ‘97 Instead of addressing logistical problems, however, German Rail seem to have been primarily concerned with damage to their trains, for which they blamed the passengers, specifically the ethnic Turks. German Rail told the BA in Nuremberg that the state of the ‘guest-worker trains’ was unacceptable and, furthermore, a danger to public health:

Particularly the trains that are used for Turkish guest-workers arrive in Munich in an indescribable state. I have attached a photo that unfortunately cannot entirely describe the extent of the unhygienic condi-tions on the train. Our workers repeatedly refuse to clean these unbelievably dirty trains. Several workers became sick to their stomachs when cleaning. Some of the cleaning ladies reported being bitten by fleas. State Health Department doctors ... report that cleaning these trains could cause an epidemic ... 98

The BA responded with an appeal to West German industry, noting that if German Rail refused to clean the trains or refused to provide train service, it could interrupt recruitment.99 In the eyes of the workers and the outside world, the same Employment Bureau that issued instructions about how many olives one could pack seemed unable or unwilling to make the connection between the lack of water and the inhumane con-ditions on the trains or to take responsibility for it. However, the programme depended on intergovernmental cooperation that never came to fruition. The BA failed to get its partners to commit to their plans.

After a year of discussion, BA officials broached the subject at an international con-ference for guest-worker travel, noting that other rail administrations could no longer be delinquent in providing the necessary water, as it was clearly needed for sanitary reasons. Strikingly, in 1969, Nuremburg BA officials finally admitted that trains were not being filled with water or cleaned properly out of an effort to keep delays to a minimum.100 But

94 BAVAV Nürnberg, an die Deutsche Bundesbahn Oberbetriebsleitung Süd, 18 Jan. 1966 BArch B 119/ 4031; see

also, BAVAV Nürnberg, an Präsident und Vorsitzer des Vorstandes der Deutschen Bundesbahn, 19 Jan. 1970 BArch

B 119/ 4031.

95 Deutsche Bundesbahn, Frankfurt, an BA Nürnberg, ‘Arbeitersonderzüge vom Balkan–Süddeutschland’, 23 Nov.

1964 BArch B 119/ 4031.

96 Ibid.

97 BAVAV Türkei an den Herrn Präsident BAVAV Nürnberg, 15 Mai 1964 BA B 119/ 4035.

98 Deutsche Bundesbahn Bundesbahndirektion München an BA Nürnberg, 10 Sep. 1964 BArch B 119 /4029.

These sentiments are repeated for years, Deutsche Bundesbahn Bundesbahndirektion München, BA Nürnberg,

Landesarbeitsamt Bayern, 1 Dez. 1964 BArch B 119/ 4029; Deutsche Bundesbahn Bundesbahndirektion München,

an BA Nürnberg, 12 Mai 1965 BArch B 119/ 4029; Eichner, BA Nürnberg, Nov. 1969 BArch B 119/ 4029; Deutsche

Bundesbahn Bundesbahndirektion München an BAVAV Nürnberg, 19 Nov. 1969 BArch B 119/ 4029.

99 BAVAV Nürnberg, 13 Sep. 1964 BA B 119/ 4029.

100 BA Nürnberg, ‘Reinigung von Sonderzügen in München’, BArch B 119/ 4029.



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this admission came too late. Starting in 1970, the German Employment Office began using aeroplanes to transport workers, especially female workers, to West Germany.101 While the era of guest-worker train transports was officially over, the relationships and negotiations that had occurred leading up to this point had a lasting impact.

II: Counter-Narratives

II.1: West German Officials Shape West Germany’s International ImageThe Second World War and the Holocaust tainted Germany’s international image, colouring how both contemporaries and present-day scholars would approach Germany’s guest-worker programme. During the programme’s tenure both West German employers and the BA were forced to address Germany’s historical legacy and assess their own roles in a new German narrative of imported foreign labour. Two per-haps surprising counter-narratives complicate the dominant negative perceptions of guest-workers in postwar West Germany. First, West German employers and officials recognized and responded to the image they were portraying of West Germany to the international community and to the German public.102 Second—as we shall see in the following section—workers’ recollections undermine the trope of the ‘naïve, passive migrant’ who was unwittingly exploited by the West German state. In both cases, the actors play to an outside audience as much as for themselves. Indeed, the employers, BA officials, the German public and the applicants alike were all cognizant of their own agency within this important test case and, significantly, within the creation of the historical record.

The eyes of the international media motivated West German employers to con-sider how the guest-worker programme and its problems could cast all of postwar West Germany in an all-too-familiar bad light. West German employers, the ultimate desti-nation of travelling workers, were not indifferent to workers’ transportation problems and grew impatient, though it was not empathy alone that motivated them. In an angry letter to the Employment Bureau—complaining that a train of guest-workers who were bound for his factory had arrived in the middle of the night, forcing passengers to wait on the platform for an additional eighteen hours—one factory owner chastised the BA, writing, ‘We believe that you will agree with us, that such occurrences do not present a good calling card for the Federal Republic of Germany’.103 As evidenced in their own internal memos, Employment Bureau officials did indeed agree that guest-worker transportation presented a negative image of West Germany and its postwar institu-tions, yet they remained largely impotent to address the larger issues.

Eerie comparisons with pre-1945 scenes also troubled many West Germans who witnessed the arrival of guest-workers. When delayed applicants arrived at Munich

101 Ibid.

102 Karen Schönwälder explores the West German public’s reaction to the recruitment of guest-workers as one

that ranged from economic necessity to pride over West German economic superiority in relation to applicant

countries, ‘West German Society and Foreigners in the 1960s’, in Philipp Gasser and Alan Steinweis (eds), Coping

with the Nazi Past: West German Debates on Nazism and Generational Conflict, 1955–1975 (New York, 2006),

pp. 113–27.

103 Duinger Steinzeugwerk Muhle & Co an den Herrn Präsidenten der Bundesanstalt für Arbeitsvermittlung

Nürnberg, 20 Jul. 1973 BArch B 119/ 4031.



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Central Station (the first stop in West Germany for workers arriving from Italy, Greece, Turkey and Yugoslavia), German Rail would not allow them to loiter on the plat-forms.104 As a result, the police escorted workers to a former air-raid shelter that was further away, causing traffic delays and, more importantly, parading ‘marching col-umns’ of bedraggled people through the streets—a disturbing image for the postwar Federal Republic.105 In an attempt to address this problematic public image, authorities utilized a massive subterranean air-raid shelter beneath the Munch Central Station. At the end of arrival Platform 11, there were stairs leading directly into the bunker, which authorities had retrofitted to serve as a waiting room. The Munich station bunker was not only convenient but also kept arriving guest-workers out of sight of the general public.106 The shadow of Germany’s recent past was all too prominent for all involved.

Train travel of foreign workers had an even more direct historical connotation for West Germany in its nomenclature, especially considering the role during the Holocaust of ‘Transports’—a euphemism used by the Reichsbahn to refer to the forced removal and mass transportation in inhumane conditions of those they were send-ing to collection and death camps. Strikingly, the BA continued until 1955 to refer to postwar guest-workers as Fremdarbeiter (the same term used for foreign forced labour before 1945). The West German press even continued to use the term well into the mid-1960s.107 Gastarbeiter (guest-worker) or Auslandische mitarbeiter (foreign co-worker) were examples of terms deemed more palatable and appropriate for the new Federal Republic and were introduced in the 1950s as acceptable alternatives. And yet, almost a decade later on 21 September 1972, the Union for Wood and Plastics wrote to the Federal Ministry for Labour and Social Affairs to formally request a name change for guest-worker train transportation. The union suggested that the historically-loaded term Transportlisten (transport list) be replaced with the term Sammelreiseliste (group-trip list).108 The Union laid bare the negative historical connotations:

When humanitarian conditions can be assumed, then naturally the terminology should avoid being, or at least not be acknowledged as being, the same as used by the SS and the Reichsbahn for ‘deportation’, for prisoners and for Fremdarbeiter ... We recognize that the Employment Bureau attempts to make the trip as pleasant as possible ... therefore, the contradiction is all the more crass for the promotion of our job market that, up until arrival, human conditions have fallen by the wayside.109

104 Notiz zur Besprechung am 15 Nov. 1963 bei der OFD in München, ‘Unterbringung der Weiterleitungsstelle für

ausländische Arbeitnehmer in Münch Hbf’, BArch B 119/ 4032.

105 Ibid. Karen Schönwälder has noted than even if West German employers did not consider the larger implications

of foreign labour in postwar Germany ‘ordinary Germans’ did; see, ‘West German Society and Foreigners in the

1960s’, in Gasser and Steinweis, Coping with the Nazi Past, pp. 113–27.

106 Jamin, Fremde Heimat, pp. 142–3.

107 ‘Heimreisende italienischer Fremdarbeiter an Weihnachten 1963’ BA B119/4031; ‘Transportlisten für

Fremdarbeiter’ 1969 BA B 110/4031; ‘Sammeltransporte von Fremdarbeitern’ 1963 BA B 119/4033; See Rita

Chin, The Guest-worker Question in Postwar Germany (New York, 2007), pp. 8–9; Hunn‚ Nächstes Jahr kehren

wir zurück ..., pp. 59–60; Monika Mattes‚ ‘Gastarbeiterinnen’ in der Bundesrepublik: Anwerbepolitik, Migration

und Geschlecht in den 50er bis 70er Jahren (Frankfurt/Main, 2005), p. 16.

108 Gewerkschaft Holz und Kunststoff an Bundesanstalt für Arbeit Herrn Minta, Betrifft: ‘Verwendung sogenannter

“Transportlisten” bei der Einreise ausländischer Arbeitnehmer in die Bundesrepublik’, 18 Dez. 1972 BArch B 119/

4029. It was in the early 1970s that unions started working on behalf of foreign workers in West German for

improved conditions. This request was a part of a larger movement of concern over guest-worker conditions in

West Germany in the early 1970s.

109 Ibid.



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The Union’s reference to ‘the promotion of the [West German] job market’ highlights the importance of the international gaze. As a result, on 24 October 1972, the Federal Employment Office sent a memo to all foreign liaison offices as well as to national labour offices noting a terminology change for all dealings with foreign workers’ travel to West Germany. They wrote, ‘the term Transportliste [transport list] will be immedi-ately replaced with Sammelreise [group trip]; Transportleiter or Transportbegleiter [transport guide] replaced with Reiseleiter or Reisebegleiter [trip guide]; ... Transportteilnehmer [transport participant] with Reiseteilnehmer [trip participant] and so forth’.110 However, by 1972 it was too late to take into consideration the historical connotations of guest-worker transportation, as the damage had already been done. Many of the various individuals involved had already chosen their answers to the Austrian reporter’s initial questions. Travelling workers especially were aware of the roles they were playing in postwar Germany’s evolving history.

II.2 Becoming a Guest-WorkerGuest-workers fit uncomfortably into existing analytic categories (such as Diaspora, immigrant and working class) and yet still overlap with these groups. A dominant nar-rative of who the guest-workers are—while attempted by journalists, policy makers, scholars and authors—will always be a constructed fiction, because paradoxes abound. Mr Kobes pointedly blamed the National Rail directly, and the BA indirectly, for delib-erately overlooking inhumane conditions, while in fact the BA was mired in nego-tiations with various organizations, attempting to address poor conditions for which they felt responsible. Another dominant narrative—that of the miserable, passive guest-worker—is also limited in the light of workers’ own recollections of skirting rules and holding onto their initial excitement and ambition. While postwar Germany was unable to let go of its past, travelling Turkish workers refused to let go of their future.

This section turns to guest-workers’ recollections (as recorded in oral history inter-views) and highlights their ambitions and disappointments, offering insight into unex-plored aspects of becoming a guest-worker.111 The interviewees were workers, not authors or scholars, and their narratives begin in Turkey with their initial decisions to leave, their application procedures and their train travel to West Germany. As these Turkish workers themselves recall, it was first during the application process, the medi-cal exams and en route to West Germany that they considered their new status as guest-workers. Through a brief discussion of the fraught medical exams, recruitment procedures and train travel, workers’ recollections of excitement and ambition, as well as disappointment, indicate ways in which they choose to become guest-workers on their own terms.

Though it was only one part of a larger application, former workers criticized the medical examination the most. It was more than simply a visit to the doctors’, and many applicants experienced the physical examination as a deeply personal, invasive

110 BA der Präsident Nürnberg an die Landesarbeitsämter und die Auslandsdienststellen, 24 Okt. 1972 BArch B119/

4029.

111 Oral histories were not usually included in the classic histories of guest-worker migration to West Germany.

See Ulrich Herbert, A History of Foreign Labor in Germany, 1880–1980: Seasonal Workers, Forces Laborers,

Guest-workers (Ann Arbor, 1990)..



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violation at the hands of a foreign man. According to historian Matilde Jamin, the experience of the medical was at the very least a culture shock in which German doctors and translators examined disrobed applicants, without consideration for having male doctors for men and female doctors for women.112 Differing cultural norms about modesty made having such an invasive examination in a group setting or undressing in front of a member of the opposite sex, or even just in front of a stranger, an extremely personal if not traumatic experience for many. For most, the procedures were also unfamiliar, especially for the women applicants, who were about 30% of all Turkish applicants. One woman, Filiz, who left Istanbul for West Berlin in 1964, recalled:

[The] things they did were very strange ... The women were all together in one room in just their under-wear. We were almost naked and went to the examination like this. They didn’t have extra changing booths. We waited inside of a big room all in a line, we were practically naked ... The doctor was a man and the translator was a woman ... I didn’t really have a problem with the doctor being a man. A doctor is a doctor whether he is a man or a woman. If the doctor had been a Turk, though, we might have been more relaxed. The translation took a long time.113

Filiz mentioned twice that they were ‘almost naked’, because they were in their under-wear, a different concept of nudity from Western Europe. When asked what other women thought of the medical examination, Filiz, herself an educated and cosmo-politan woman, recalled: ‘I have to point out that, because we were from Istanbul, we were more relaxed and it was to our advantage. In the later years, those coming from Anatolia had a different lifestyle ... There were women [not from the city] who were seeing a doctor for the first time ... so I couldn’t say it was the same as what they experienced. We were more comfortable.’114 The Turkish Branch of the BA also noted that specifically ‘Anatolian women’ needed medical examinations to determine if they were ‘suitable’.115 It is interesting that both Filiz and the BA had the same stereo-type about women coming from Anatolia—that they were different. Yet both Filiz and these Anatolian women worked with the same West German Employment Office and made the same westward trip, even if they had entirely different reasons for going.116 Ultimately, they all arrived in West Germany as guest-workers. Over time, applicants of different class, education, religious and regional backgrounds would come to see them-selves as the same—foreigners in Germany—by enduring common experiences. While noting that she had little in common with a woman from Anatolia, Filiz internalizes the dichotomy of ‘Turk’ versus ‘German’ here nonetheless.

The medical examination was not necessarily easier for male applicants, who also described the exam as invasive. One worker said that he had to get completely naked in order to have his genitals examined, together with twenty-five other people in the room.117 Another male worker recalled his medical exam as especially intrusive:

112 Jamin, 50 Jahre, p. 158.

113 DOMiT Interview 16, ‘Filiz’, 15 August 1995.

114 Ibid.

115 BAVAV Türkei, Der Direktor, Istanbul, An BAVAV, Nürnberg, 12 Aug. 1970 BArch B119/ 4031.

116 Karin Hunn writes that some Anatolian women were ‘forced’ or at least highly encouraged by their families or

spouses to sign up to be guest-workers in Nächstes Jahr; see also Jamin, 50 Jahre; DOMiT Interviews 18 and 19,

‘Mother and Daughter’.

117 DOMiT interview 22, ‘Erol’, 12 Oct. 1995.



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They had us take off our pants and made us bend over so they could examine our anuses with their fingers ... [There was a] German doctor, Turkish doctor, and of course there was a translator. [Was it difficult for you?] Of course it was difficult. I almost changed my mind and decided not to go to Germany when they had me take off my pants and made me bend over, but a girl came up to me and said that there was nothing wrong with what they had been doing. 118

He does not comment on what he thought of the woman’s presence when he was in such a vulnerable, exposed state. Instead, he focuses in his interview on how strict the medical examinations were, pointing out that the slightest problem would mean fail-ing: ‘People who had both high and low blood pressure failed the checkups. Anyone who had signs of infirmity or who had more than three cavities failed. They didn’t care if you were tall, big-framed or not’.119 While such perhaps arbitrary medical exami-nations might seem to have uncanny similarities with Germany’s pre-1945 era, it is important to remember that examining potential immigrants for suitability to cross constructed biological borders was nothing new.120 Even more striking, though, in the light of such a careful medical examination, was that the BA did not test this man’s technical skills at all, implying that the medical exam was much more important than how vocationally qualified he might be. That West German officials gave these medical exams priority over vocational exams—whether out of fear of overburdening the West German health care system, a desire for the strongest workers or a more biased view of Turkish healthcare—suggests that they thought something was at risk with these workers. Furthermore, despite otherwise detailed instructions on all other parts of the application, workers did not know what to expect from the medical examinations and most were surprised and extremely uncomfortable when doctors crossed boundaries of personal modesty.

Turkish applicants were not naïve about the application process either. Indeed, in interviews, former workers talked openly about bribery and manipulation during the application. For example, Hasan, who went to work at Ford in 1962, said that when his blood was taken during the medical examination, he ‘gave the man around 50 to 60 Lira to make sure it was clean’.121 Erol noted that during his medical examination, the men in line helped one another, sharing, for example, urine samples if someone knew of a problem; another man had friends fashion fake tooth fillings for him from bottle tops. Another man, Mehmet, who was injured in the military and had lost the use of his hands, had his friends ‘harass’ a German doctor who had told Mehmet that no one would possibly hire him in such a condition. After the alleged ‘harassment’, the doctor signed off on a forged medical record, and Mehmet made it all the way to West Germany—where his employer subsequently fired him upon discovery that Mehmet could barely use his hands.122

118 DOMiT interview 23, ‘Mehmet A’, 9 Oct. 1995.

119 Ibid.

120 For comparisons with medical exam for immigrants at Ellis Island in New York, NY, USA, see Roger Daniels,

Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (New York, 1990), p. 274; Peter

Morton Coan, Ellis Island Interviews: In Their Own Words (New York, Inc., 1997) pp. xv, 3, 10, 12, 258, 261; Amy

L. Fairchild, Science at the Borders: Immigrant Medical Inspection and the Shaping of the Modern Industrial Labor

Force (Baltimore, 2003).

121 DOMiT Interview 27, ‘Hasan’, 22 Jun. 1995.

122 DOMiT Interview 17, ‘Mehmet B’, 27 Jun. 1995.



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Moreover, despite the detailed year-long application procedure outlined in published instructions, one man had a friend set up his application for him within only a week’s time with the help of a forged document:[A] friend ... told us that if any of us wanted to go to Germany, he could arrange it; he knew someone who could send us there. I didn’t quite believe what he said, but at the same time I wanted to go to Germany. He took us to the Employment Office ... [then] the man he knew took me to the German Liaison Office ... The people working there knew about my friend’s friend, and they welcomed us. This guy told the civil servant working there to send me to Germany. They said, ‘Your wish is our command’. They immediately filled out an application with an old date on it, and I signed it. I got my invitation within a week and started doing the paperwork.123

In this case, none of the standard application considerations, such as an assessment of his ‘moral character’, ‘professional abilities’, age, nor ‘general appropriateness’ mat-tered; he was connected.124 In short, for many workers the printed instructions were false, irrelevant and ineffectual or simply ignored at some point. Significantly, workers’ ability to ignore or modify instructions or call on networks of friends and family for help is evidence of how they manipulated the situation instead of being solely manipulated by it. Especially in the extremely exhaustive and invasive medical examination, workers willingly helped one another negotiate the process, despite the dizzying list of require-ments and bureaucracy outlined in the published instructions. The medical examina-tions also highlighted that two very different institutionalized bureaucracies were at work, presenting a cultural clash.

In the same interviews, though, workers’ recollections about their initial excitement for a new life in West Germany accompany if not trump the poor experiences, recasting their narrative as one in which they retain historical agency. ‘As I was looking out of the window of the train, noticing that we were crossing the border from Turkey into Bulgaria, I thought, I will return in 5 to 10 years a millionaire’, recalled Cahit, a Turkish man who arrived in West Germany in 1964.125 In spite of poor conditions while in transit, former workers often insist upon having had a sense of adventure, excitement, apprehension and above all else ambition in their initial decision to move to West Germany. Cahit also noted that he changed into fresh clothes and shaved before getting off the train in Munich: he was hoping beautiful German girls would greet him at the station. Instead he was led into the subterranean bunker, ‘They said, you will sleep here and tomorrow you will go to Berlin ... It was a shock’.126 Another worker, Erol, who came from a middle-class back-ground (his father was a judge and his mother had attended an exclusive girls’ college) commented that he also wanted to come to West Germany for adventure, especially to meet women. He described the misery of his trip to West Germany thus:They placed bags in our hands together with plastic water canisters at the Vinegar Seller’s Harbour, and with them we boarded a local train. There were no compartments; it was open. It was a three-and-a-half day trip by train. Excuse me please [for saying this] but there was no water to use for cleaning one’s back-side [after using the toilet]. We were also unshaven ... We took turns sleeping in the aisles on newspaper and in the places meant for luggage. We arrived in a state of agony and torment.127

123 DOMiT Interview 23, ‘Mehmet A’, 9 Oct. 1995.

124 İşçi Olarak Almanya’ya Nasıl Gidiler? İş ve İşçi Bulma Kurumu Genel Müdürlüğü Yayınları No 28 (Ankara: Mars

Matbaası, 1963), p. 97.

125 DOMiT Interview 15, ‘Cahit’, 30 Aug. 1995.

126 Ibid.

127 DOMiT Interview 22, ‘Erol’, 12 Oct. 1995.



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Yet Erol also highlighted his excitement: ‘there was a guy with a Wilkinson razor ... and we shaved with it before we got off the train in Munich. After all, we had come for the women; so to look good, to look handsome, we shaved with the bottled soda pop that we had picked up in Yugoslavia.’128 Even in the face of inhumane conditions, Erol anticipated no problems in achieving his personal goals. Erol noted that he had gone to West Germany for an urban lifestyle—to see the latest fashions (especially the disco boots) and night life; it was an adventure and he considered the poor treatment just a hiccup in his larger ambitions for success.129 Upon arrival, Erol’s story mirrors Cahit’s:

We got off [the train in Munich] around morning ... They treated us like we were a bunch of bums ... [those] from Anatolia ... were wearing çarık [rawhide sandals] on their feet and yorgan [traditional quilt bags] as clothing. We formed a double line and followed a translator who had a megaphone ... [We] were treated like soldiers, lining up. Under the station there were small dark rooms.130

The negative connotations of marching columns of ragged foreign workers and subter-ranean holding cells were not lost on the arriving guest-workers, just as they were not lost on the German population or the BA.

Other former workers would call into question Cahit’s, Erol’s and others’ sense of adventure and light-hearted comments about German girls. One man, Murat, said that he came to West Germany as an official guest-worker because of poverty and unem-ployment at home:

this is the main reason that everybody comes here, but some people lie about it. They say they did this, they did that ... It’s all a lie. The only reason to go to Germany, to go abroad, is unemployment ... A person with money in his pockets, doing well in his business, couldn’t stand the difficulties of a foreign land.131

Despite how workers recast their departure in oral histories, deciding to leave for West Germany and begin the long application process and journey westward was extremely difficult even before they encountered the medical examination and the material condi-tions of the trains. One woman recalls her parents’ departure for West Germany with great sadness:

I remember very well the day that my father left for Germany ... People came to say goodbye ... My mother and I were alone in Ankara ... [When my mother joined him a year later] I was dropped off at my grand-mother’s. It was the most painful day of my life ... In Turkey, everybody told us ‘your mother and father are sweeping up money from the ground in Germany’.132

Turkish guest-workers sought their own ‘economic miracles’ by going to West Germany, but the decision, application and trip there changed them and their extended families irreversibly before they entered Germany. Despite the obvious economic reasons for going to West Germany, the decision to stay and create a new life there resulted from a series of negotiations before departure and along the way that extended beyond the economic.

Even when eschewing positive narratives of excitement and ambitious goals, workers who recalled negative experiences often chose to accompany them with comments on how they negotiated the conditions, revising their history with their own recollections.

128 Ibid.

129 Ibid.

130 Ibid.

131 DOMiT Interview 14, ‘Murat’, 30 Aug. 1995.

132 DOMiT Interview 8, ‘Aygül’, 22 May 1995. She ended up joining her parents in West Germany a few years later.



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One man, M., began with a common narrative: he came to West Germany in 1962, leaving his wife and children behind with the plan to get a vocational education for two years and then return to Turkey; he worked for Ford in Cologne for four years.133 ‘Forget about [speaking] German, the workers were the kind of people who barely knew Turkish’, he commented, continuing, ‘The Turks’ mental state was bad. Including me, no one got what he was hoping for. However, returning to Turkey would have been humiliating: being unsuccessful ... was a shame so we had to stand being there’. One place M. found solace was in a newly-founded Turkish Association, where he would play his bağlama or saz (a long-necked lute, traditionally used in Ottoman and Turkish music). He gained the reputation and title aşık or troubadour, which he denied, say-ing ‘I am not a poet’. But one night, he recalled climbing up the stage at the Turkish Association and announcing to the clapping crowd that he was going to ‘tell them an epic about our coming to Germany’. He continued:

Let’s call it ‘Germany Epic’. They clapped a lot. I wasn’t prepared at all and said, ‘Forgive me if this doesn’t rhyme’. I closed my eyes and started playing. I sang about the day we left Turkey from the Vinegar Seller’s Station, the difficulties we had in Zagreb, changing trains on a winter day, and the day we came to the Cologne train station. We heard the harmonica playing, but we couldn’t figure out what it was. It turned out that they were welcoming us with a band.134

Of all of his memories, M. chose to begin ‘Germany Epic’ with his departure from Istanbul and travel to West Germany. His story begins in Turkey and his first vivid memory is the changing of trains in Zagreb. The train trip to West Germany repre-sented a point of personal transition for him and many others into someone and some-thing else; it was an emotional, personal and transformative journey.

III: Conclusion

After arrival in West Germany, guest-workers were not necessarily surprised by the sub-standard living arrangements and difficult work conditions that awaited them. The train trip offered workers the first clues to their future treatment as guest-workers, and the travel conditions also predisposed workers to certain views of West German employers and authorities, which would come to a head years later in labour conflicts and national debates. Applicants could use the application and travel period to focus on their goals for life in West Germany and ‘stayed’ despite the poor conditions—after all they had gone through to get to West Germany, why would they leave? The train trip also illuminated the dynamic of the entire guest-worker programme for years to come—good intentions on the part of officials followed by a lack of implementation. And yet, intergovernmen-tal exchanges, plans and failures cannot possibility capture the subjective, transnational experience of individual guest-workers, whose narrative began even before boarding the first train. This population, haphazardly gelled together through common, often miserable experiences, formed a new vanguard of global labour migrants as postwar West Germany tentatively and self-consciously stepped back into the spotlight of west-ern industrial production in the new Cold War order.

133 DOMiT Interview 62, ‘M’. Apr. 1995.

134 Ibid.



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Postwar guest-worker programmes between West Germany and southern European and African countries offer a lens through which to evaluate Germany’s evolving rela-tionship with foreign labour and its historical legacy. Within these considerations of his-torical continuities versus ruptures, though, exist individuals with their own agendas who disrupt dominant conceptions and expectations. Kobes’s questions remain relevant, but there is more to the story. It is not clear whether the BA and West German employers were acting out of empathy, or whether they were driven by the sense of a censorious international gaze on them, but they did acknowledge their roles and responsibilities towards guest-workers in ways not previously admitted. Guest-workers, too, defy exist-ing narratives and analytic categories, as they transported their ‘life space’—the site of conscious actors functioning within their cultures and communities—over borders and as situations evolved.135 These workers created an interesting hybrid of working-class and immigrant community, one that has been consistently unstable by remaining in motion and under constant redefinition from multiple sides. The case study of Turkish guest-workers in West Germany, especially their train travel, complicates debates of German exceptionalism by pushing such considerations into the postwar era. This essay has sought to demonstrate that the various actors involved—whether they come from the media, from official positions, work places or the applicant pool—were cog-nizant of their roles in the continuing debates over Germany’s legacy, its new com-mitment to democracy and its sense of atonement for the past. These same actors functioned individually and independently of these debates as well, carving out spaces for their own agendas and ambitions, adding nuance to a routinely effaced historical experience. ‘In this train, you see, anything is possible’, the conductor told Kobes, and he was right.136

Abstract

Guest-worker transportation, the train ride that most workers had to take, created guest-workers long before arrival in West Germany. West German officials, who were self-conscious about the new West German national image in the postwar era in ways scholars have not previously recognized, attempted to provide a smooth transition to West Germany for these new foreign workers. Because West German officials were largely unsuccessful in this, diverse workers formed negative impressions of their future hosts, creating an experience and a chronological phase in the guest-worker narrative that predates arrival in West Germany and continued long after. West German Employment Bureau officials, employers and the guest-workers themselves also offered counter-narratives to the dominant negative perceptions of guest-workers.

Keywords: guest-worker programmes, migration, immigration, postwar Germany, Turkish minority in Germany, train transportation

Southern Illinois University [email protected]

135 Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (Ithaca, 1999), p. 198. I would like to

thank my colleague, Dr Jeffrey Manuel, for bringing this source to my attention.

136 ‘Notbremse im Hellas-Istanbul Express’, Salzburger Nachrichten, 17 (28 Jun. 1969) BArch B 119/ 4030.



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