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In 1961, desperate to increase its labor force, West Germany signed an employment agreement with Turkey and launched a wave of immigration that continues to have repercussions today.<\/p>\n
Now, after years of being treated as second-class citizens in Europe\u2019s economic powerhouse, large numbers of Turks \u2014 descendants of the first wave of immigrants \u2014 are returning to Turkey.<\/p>\n
In A Strange Land<\/p>\n
Yucel Yolcu, 44, has a good life in Istanbul. He likes his job as a film director; his sunny apartment on a hill above the Bosphorus is alive with the sounds of guests and pets.<\/p>\n
But when he thinks back to his early childhood in Germany, he\u2019s amazed things worked out this way. His early memories are of being left on his own at age 5 while his parents went off to work in a German factory.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a backyard of an old Berlin building, and I saw there were other black-haired kids like me \u2026 staying all the day in the backyard, and we didn\u2019t know what we are doing there,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd there were other kids, blond, looking a little bit different, and we couldn\u2019t understand each other.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some would argue that Germans and their growing Turkish minority never learned to understand each other.<\/p>\n
Reasons To Leave<\/p>\n
At first, the Turks believed they would soon be returning home with the wealth to start a better life. But as Turkey\u2019s political situation was roiled by violent unrest and military coups, more and more Turks opted to stay in Germany.<\/p>\n
Semra Guzel-Korver with the European Broadcasting Union has made two documentaries on Turks in Germany. She\u2019s not surprised that a growing number of them are leaving Germany, now that Turkey\u2019s economy is robust and growing.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of Turkish, especially young generation, come back to Istanbul and other Turkish cities, because \u2026 they cannot find jobs anymore in Germany,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey finished the university, they know three or four languages, everything is perfect \u2014 but their name is Turkish,\u201d Guzel-Korver adds.<\/p>\n
She says the euro crisis has increased racism and Islamophobia.<\/p>\n
Resorting To Gangs<\/p>\n
Racism and Islamophobia are what drove some Turks in Germany to make a stand. They watched in dismay as a recession in the 1980s and the reunification of Germany after 1989 brought a rise in neo-Nazi violence against immigrants.<\/p>\n
As the neo-Nazi attacks spiked in the early \u201990s, young Turkish immigrants began to form street gangs and confront them. Al Jazeera\u2019s English channel\u00a0aired a documentary\u00a0about the most famous of the Turkish gangs, known as \u201c36 Boys.\u201d In the film, former gang member Soner Arslan said organizing was a matter of survival.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe 36 Boys, people think we\u2019re dangerous and beat people up all the time, but the reality wasn\u2019t like that,\u201d he said. \u201cWe had a war here, and we had to protect ourselves. They wanted to kill us, and the German police and politicians did nothing about it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Coming \u2018Home\u2019<\/p>\n
For decades, the Turks kept coming, but now the flow is reversing.\u00a0One recent study concludes\u00a0that some 193,000 Turks left Germany to come home between 2007 and 2011. The most commonly cited reasons were better job prospects in Turkey and discrimination in Germany.<\/p>\n
Yolcu was a member of the 36 Boys gang (named after the postal code of a tough Berlin neighborhood where many of them grew up). But one day, he decided that he was never going to get work in films if he stayed in a drug- and violence-prone gang.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have to make a new start. I felt like I have to earn money with art, and all my friends were dealers. I mean, they are still dealing,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
Yolcu wound up in Istanbul, sleeping on a friend\u2019s couch and trying to break into the film business. It was around that time that he began a new, unexpected process of adjustment. For all his efforts to cling to a Turkish identity while in Germany, he now found that in some ways these Turks were utter foreigners to him.<\/p>\n
He was surprised to find a Germanic desire for order welling up in him one day while walking down Istanbul\u2019s teeming downtown thoroughfare, with masses of people jostling this way and that.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou know, I can\u2019t understand why all the people are walking like this! And one day I was nearly to cry, \u2018Stop! You go right and you go left!\u2019 \u201d he says. \u201cI mean, I couldn\u2019t understand why there is no people who says, \u2018It\u2019s too much people here! You don\u2019t see it?\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n
Over time, Yolcu grew to embrace the relative chaos of Turkey and now feels at home here. He also keeps an eye out for his fellow\u00a0Almancis, or German-Turks, because he knows what it\u2019s like to feel like a stranger in your homeland.<\/p>\n
via German-Turks Leaving Germany For Turkey | loonwatch.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When a majority of fellow citizens believe that the religion you follow is incompatible with their nation then you may be inspired to move elsewhere. When you are less likely to get a job that you are as qualified as anyone else to perform because of the way your name sounds that may inspire you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":70274,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[1458],"class_list":["post-70272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-germany","tag-turks-living-in-germany"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70272","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=70272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70272\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}