{"id":46234,"date":"2011-11-01T06:35:19","date_gmt":"2011-11-01T04:35:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/?p=46234"},"modified":"2011-11-01T06:35:19","modified_gmt":"2011-11-01T04:35:19","slug":"a-50-year-journey-for-turkey-and-germany","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2011\/11\/01\/a-50-year-journey-for-turkey-and-germany\/","title":{"rendered":"A 50-Year Journey for Turkey and Germany"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By SOUAD MEKHENNET<\/h6>\n
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ISTANBUL \u2014 It was cold and wintry in Istanbul, that day in 1961, when Mehmet Ali Zaimoglu boarded a train to Germany carrying a small bag with a few items of clothing, his only pair of shoes and some beans and bread to eat on what he knew would be a days-long trip to a strange country.<\/h4>\n<\/div>\n
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Mr. Zaimoglu, now 73, was one of 750,000 Turks who eventually made that trip to Germany between 1961 and 1972 as so-called guest workers. What was then West Germany needed their labor, because some of its industries had trouble filling vacant jobs.<\/p>\n

Sunday marked 50 years since Turkey and Germany first formed an agreement to bring in Turkish workers \u2014 a step that neither country, it seems, realized would usher in profound social change.<\/p>\n

Before 1961, Germany turned to other European countries \u2014 Italy, Spain, Portugal \u2014 for workers. The arrangement with Turkey lasted until a German economic downturn in 1973. Today, about 2.5 million of Germany\u2019s 82.2 million inhabitants are of Turkish background; some have been in Germany for three generations. Neighborhoods in some German cities, like Kreuzberg in Berlin, are palpably Turkish, and debate rages about integration, and whether the German government should drop its opposition to Turkey joining the European Union.<\/p>\n

Mr. Zaimoglu grew up in the mountainous countryside of Afyon Province in western Turkey, very different from the packed train he boarded 50 years ago, which he recalled was jammed with other anxious young men and women.<\/p>\n

Like most of the other men, Mr. Zaimoglu left his wife in Turkey \u2014 along with three children and a sick, elderly father. Back then, the agreement was just between the laborers and their employers. Many families remained separated for years, because the guest workers had been expected to leave Germany eventually.<\/p>\n

That was one reason Germany did little to integrate the workers. Most guest workers stayed in housing set up specifically for them. \u201cWe lived with other men from Turkey, Italy, Spain or Portugal,\u201d Mr. Zaimoglu said, smiling. \u201cIt was great because I mixed with people from other cultures, but none of them could speak German and that was a problem.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cem \u00d6zdemir, now the co-chairman of the German Green Party and the son of Turkish guest workers who arrived in Germany in the early 1960s, said many politicians today forget history. \u201cI know of people who started to ask for German language courses, but the answer they got was: \u2018People speak enough German to understand orders,\u201d\u2019 he said in an interview. \u201cIt\u2019s unfair to blame the generation of my parents if their German is not as good as it should be.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. \u00d6zdemir\u2019s parents met and married in Germany, where both worked for years in textiles. \u201cI remember when I was a child, my mother came home with bloody arms\u201d from lifting heavy goods, Mr \u00d6zdemir said. \u201cIt was work which a lot of Germans didn\u2019t want to do. That is a fact which many people like to forget.\u201d His mother later opened a tailoring shop, which she still runs.<\/p>\n

Many of the Turkish applicants had to go through a selection process. Although the existence of this sometimes humiliating process is acknowledged by all sides, many are ashamed to talk about it.<\/p>\n

\u00dcmmu Yavas, 65, applied with her husband for jobs in Germany in 1971. She got a confirmation letter before her husband, and was invited to the German consulate in Istanbul. \u201cMy husband accompanied me and he waited in a room when I was asked to go and meet a doctor from Germany,\u201d Mrs. Yavas said. She paused. \u201cThere were nine other women in the room and we were asked to take off all our clothes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mrs. Yavas was then 25, raised in a small town near Antalya. She had never undressed in front of others in her small circle growing up; in the consulate, she had a gynecological examination in front of the other women. \u201cI felt terrible,\u201d she said. \u201cThey also checked our teeth and I thought, \u2018Why are they treating us like animals?\u2019 We just want to go for work in Germany.\u201d<\/p>\n

Days later, Mrs. Yavas got a letter informing her that she should fly to Germany to work in a hotel. In December 1971, she boarded the plane, leaving behind her husband and 10-month-old daughter. Her husband followed her two months later, and they worked together in the cleaning crew at a hotel near Freudenstadt in southwest Germany and then in a factory. \u201cAll the workers were foreigners, mainly from Turkey,\u201d she said. \u201cWe didn\u2019t learn any German \u2014 no time for a language course.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over the decades, her health \u2014 like that of many guest workers \u2014 has deteriorated. They blame the heavy work and the strain of splitting their lives between Turkey and Germany. Several \u2014 like Mr. Zaimoglu \u2014 still move between the two.<\/p>\n

He was among workers who boarded a special train in Istanbul last week, arriving in Munich on Sunday, to mark the 50th anniversary of a pact that changed their lives.<\/p>\n

Ibrahim Yorgun, now 76, was another who had boarded that first train to Germany and was making the anniversary trip. \u201cI left my health and youth in Germany,\u201d he said of his years working in an iron factory. \u201cBut at least it was worth doing for my children.\u201d His son is a lawyer and his daughter a teacher, both in Frankfurt.<\/p>\n

Mr. \u00d6zdemir said it was important to acknowledge that Germany for years missed the chance of integrating the guest workers. \u201cNeither Turkey as the sending country nor Germany as receiving country did enough, for a long time, to take care of these people,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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A version of this article appeared in print on October 31, 2011, in The International Herald Tribune with the headline: A 50-Year Journey for 2 Countries.<\/h6>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By SOUAD MEKHENNET ISTANBUL \u2014 It was cold and wintry in Istanbul, that day in 1961, when Mehmet Ali Zaimoglu boarded a train to Germany carrying a small bag with a few items of clothing, his only pair of shoes and some beans and bread to eat on what he knew would be a days-long […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":634077,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[7405],"class_list":["post-46234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-germany","tag-50th-anniversary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46234\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/634077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}