Imagining a German Multiculturalism: Aras Ören and the Contested Meanings of the "Guest Worker,"

1955-1980
Rita C.-K. Chin Radical History Review 83 (2002) 44-72

Over the past fifteen years, numerous economic, political, and literary studies of the so-called
Gastarbeiter (guest worker) question have provided a much fuller and more meaningful portrait of the
Federal Republic of Germany's labor recruitment program following World War II. Yet these various
modes of scholarship have remained largely insulated from one another, divided by their respective
disciplinary concerns. Social scientists have focused on questions of economic advantage, policy making,
and demographic change, but they have tended to ignore the broader cultural impact and the publicly
debated meanings of the recruitment. 1 Conversely, literary scholars have often presented the government
treaties as static political precursors to the emergence of an evolving cultural production by minorities:
"official" policy serves as historical prologue, followed by a series of counterhegemonic literary
maneuvers. 2
At this point, it seems worth examining these transnational histories in tandem, especially in the context of
the early 1970s, a juncture that has figured prominently in the previous scholarship. Social scientists have
highlighted 1973 as the official endpoint of recruitment, a major change in the government's labor policy
with significant consequences for the demographics of foreign workers in the Federal Republic. Literary
scholars, meanwhile, have marked these years as the beginning of [End Page 44] Gastarbeiter- or
Ausländerliteratur, emphasizing the critical moment when artists and intellectuals from those same
immigrant groups began to publish works in German. But we have never really taken into account the
historical proximity of these two watersheds: the fact that Gastarbeiterliteratur emerged at almost the same
time that the category of guest worker underwent fundamental redefinition. Nor have we explored their
reciprocal relation, the ways in which minority literature both grew out of and simultaneously altered
public discussions of the guest worker. My argument here is that the early 1970s marked the crucial
moment when these two modes of representation converged as minority literature came into explicit
dialogue with government rhetoric. Both policy making and cultural production, in other words, need to be
understood as constituent parts of an ongoing and contested discourse surrounding the guest worker-a
discourse that did not simply begin or end during the early 1970s, but that, more accurately, shifted. 3

This discursive shift complicates both of the conventional historical narratives about the labor recruitment.
Early policy statements, for example, require examination not only in terms of what they said, but also
how they were articulated. In what ways did government officials, industry leaders, and journalists talk
about and promote the recruitment program to the German public? What image of the guest worker
emerged in the official pronouncements, and what did these images omit? On the other hand, if the first
literary works produced by minority writers added "a new voice" to public discussions about the guest
worker, how exactly did these minority expressions attempt to complicate and contest the earlier policy
statements? 4 And in what ways did they differ from other contemporary critiques of the labor importation
issued by German intellectuals such as Günter Wallraff, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Max Frisch?

These interrelated questions about the postwar labor recruitment and its discursive construction constitute
the central theme of my essay. The Turkish-German intellectual, Aras Ören, who perhaps more than
anyone else reshaped the boundaries of public debate about the guest worker after 1970, figures as the key
player in my story. Ören first articulated his views on the Gastarbeiter in the Berlin Trilogie (1973-80), a
collection of three poetic cycles loosely narrating the everyday lives and concerns of both Turkish and
German workers in Berlin's Kreuzberg district. Although he wrote these texts in Turkish, he collaborated in
their immediate translation into German, redirecting his work toward a much broader German-speaking
audience. Ören, then, did not just add a "Turkish voice" to the public debates about the labor recruitment.
He also added a voice that sought out-and existed in-a mass market, a voice that garnered the widespread
attention of German reviewers, and a voice which problematized the most basic official assumptions about
the Gastarbeiter.

Ören's mode of critique in the Berlin Trilogie did not remain static. Between 1973 and 1980, in fact, one
finds a dramatic shift in the poems' central concerns- [End Page 45] from an impassioned plea for cross-
ethnic worker solidarity to perhaps the first explicitly multicultural characters and themes produced by a
West German writer. 5 Thus, if the initial translation of Ören's texts marked a new kind of minority literary
presence in the German public sphere, his work over the next decade demonstrated a fundamental
rethinking of what constituted German identity itself.

Enter the Guest Worker

At the most basic level, the West German policy of importing foreign labor emerged as a solution to two
urgent and mutually reinforcing developments: the unexpected industrial boom of the so-called economic
miracle and the growing shortage of able-bodied male workers. In the immediate aftermath of the Second
World War, the ruin of Germany's physical landscape appeared so complete that most expert observers,
both German and non-German, were deeply pessimistic about the country's economic future. As one British
contemporary put it, the economy seemed "cast back to the beginnings of industrialization." 6 Yet the West
German economy began to stabilize and embarked on a path of self-sustaining growth between 1948 and
1952, a development indicated by the firm establishment of the new currency, the recovery of industrial
production and the gross domestic product beyond the 1936 level, and four successive years of increase for
the capital stock of industry. 7 During the first five years of the economic miracle, the annual economic
growth rate rose 8.2 percent and, for the period between 1950 and 1970, averaged slightly more than 6
percent. 8

At the same time, West Germany had to contend with a shrinking workforce. The devastation of two
major wars in the space of thirty years had already diminished the number of working-age men. In addition,
as historians have recently demonstrated, the Federal Republic undertook a redomestication of women in
the 1950s, encouraging those who had participated in the wartime workforce to return to the home. 9
During the first decade of the economic miracle, a stream of Ostvertriebene-ethnic Germans, both those
expelled from former territories of the Third Reich and those fleeing the Soviet invasion from the East-
somewhat alleviated the shortage of male laborers. 10 But the government also took preliminary steps to
secure a backup source of manpower by signing an agreement with Italy on December 22, 1955, that
provided for the recruitment of Italian workers.

The need for labor became more desperate, however, with the erection of the Berlin Wall in August 1961,
an event that dramatically lowered the numbers of workers from the East. 11 Several changes in the West
German social structure further exacerbated the labor shortage: better pension plans leading to an earlier
average retirement age; a longer period of required education; the extension of compulsory military service
from twelve to eighteen months; and the drop in the average number of working hours from 44.4 in 1960 to
41.4 in 1968. 12 Together, these changes created a major crisis in the West German labor market;
supplemental workers were desperately needed to meet the economic boom's heavy demand for more and
more [End Page 46] manpower. By the summer of 1959, an article in Der Spiegel reported, "The struggle
to find more workers has become a stressful and constant effort that the personnel departments of both
large industrial enterprises and smaller firms . . . find themselves embroiled in." 13

As a result, the Federal Republic embarked on a course of action designed to secure an unlimited supply of
male labor. 14 Following the recruitment policy it had established with Italy, the German government
signed similar labor importation treaties with Spain and Greece in 1960; Turkey in 1961; Portugal in
1964; and Yugoslavia in 1968. 15 These agreements provided for a relatively uniform pattern of foreign
worker recruitment. Potential laborers applied to work in West Germany at service branches of the
Bundesanstalt für Arbeitsvermittlung und Arbeitslosenversicherung (Federal Office for Labor Recruitment
and Unemployment Insurance) set up in their home countries. Their applications were forwarded to the
main office in Nuremberg, which also processed requests from German companies seeking workers. This
agency served as the go-between for employers and potential employees, screening and then assigning
laborers to specific firms. 16 Initially, the treaties stipulated that work and residence permits would be
granted on a two-year basis in order to provide for frequent assessments of the actual need for manpower.

In the early years, the pool of recruited workers consisted almost entirely of men between the ages of
twenty and forty who were either single or left their families at home. For the most part, these guest
workers found employment as unskilled or semiskilled laborers, especially in areas that required heavy or
dirty work, shift work, and repetitive production methods. 17 This allowed German nationals to move into
more desirable kinds of tasks. In mining and industry, for example, the numbers of Germans decreased by
over 870,000 from 1961 to 1971, while the number of foreigners in those same areas increased by 1.1
million. In this same period, about 3 million German workers switched to white-collar jobs. 18 Initially,
imported laborers tended to live in barracks or dormitories constructed by the employing companies on or
near the factory site. 19 These barracks often housed six to eight workers in a room, each with his own
bunk bed, but little or no common space. 20 Especially during the first years of the recruitment program,
most foreign workers did almost nothing except work, eat, and sleep.

The Guest Worker in the German Public Sphere

This intense-and largely isolated-life of toil found little public expression during the early 1960s. Most
government statements on the labor recruitment focused on the needs of the economy. With a shrinking
native male workforce and the eastern refugee pool now cut off, Labor Minister Theodor Blank maintained
that no viable alternative to the massive recruitment of guest workers existed if the Federal Republic
wanted to prolong its economic expansion. 21 Early reports from the Bundesanstalt für Arbeitsvermittlung
simply detailed the monthly development of the [End Page 47] labor market, citing the numbers of the
employed, the unemployed, jobs remaining, and foreigners working in German industry. By 1963, this
office began to tie foreign recruitment more directly to the large number of remaining job openings. The
title for the June report, for example, read, "Over 800,000 foreigners employed, and even yet 597,000 open
positions-the situation in the labor market." 22 Less than two weeks later, a Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung article (referring to this same government document) made the connection more strongly:
"According to this study, the number of employed in 1966 will only be slightly larger than in 1962, if the
number of foreign workers stays about the same. A compelling rise in the employment potential of the
West German economy can only be reached for the future through a further rise in the employment quota
of foreign workforces." 23

At the same time, many employers recognized positive gains from using guest workers and documented
their views in newsletters such as Der Arbeitgeber. They claimed, for instance, that long-term savings far
outweighed the initial expenses incurred for hiring foreigners-such as recruitment fees, interpreters,
housing, and training costs-since these workers would, in most cases, contribute their labor and not
collect the restricted medical benefits for which they were eligible. 24 Recruits also paid income tax and
social security, thereby effectively subsidizing the social welfare system. 25 As one manager explained: "A
foreigner in our employ places the best years of his labor power at our disposal. For employing firms, this
results in the advantage that an older foreign worker, or one no longer fully fit and able to work, will only
rarely have to be retained on the payroll for reasons of social policy." 26

A widely distributed 1964 photograph from the Deutsche Presse-Agentur expresses most powerfully the
official position on the labor recruitment. The image documents a celebration to welcome Armado
Rodrigues of Portugal, the one millionth guest worker to come to the Federal Republic. At the most basic
level, Rodrigues functions as a stand-in for countless faceless workers before him-he is a facilitator as well
as beneficiary of West Germany's boom economy. He embodies a strong and healthy male worker-
precisely the kind of worker deemed essential for sustaining economic growth. Flanked by smiling leaders
of government and industry, Rodrigues poses with a bouquet on top of a gleaming new moped-his gifts for
being the lucky representative-and seems to exemplify the optimism and progressive ideology of the
miracle years. The moped serves as Rodrigues's metaphoric vehicle on the road to prosperity and as a
symbol of West Germany's phoenixlike recovery. In a sense, this picture functions as the visual counterpart
to the official mantra of mutual benefits: government leaders maintain national prosperity, business obtains
much needed labor forces, and guest workers from poorer Mediterranean countries gain access to a higher
standard of living. All evidence of economic exploitation, labor conflict, and public anxiety about the
presence of a million non-Germans has been pushed outside of the frame. 27 [End Page 48] [Begin
Page 50]

Twenty years later, the West German government continued to discuss the recruitment of guest workers
as an uncontested policy. A 1984 pamphlet published by the Federal Office for Political Education
(Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung), for example, asserted, "All socially relevant groups in the Federal
Republic bore responsibility for the decision to fill job vacancies with foreign employees. There was no
noteworthy discussion about alternatives or social implications. Political parties as well as social groups-
from the unions and the employers' associations to the charities and churches-saw in the employment of
foreign labor a provisional phenomenon necessary for the meantime." 28 Once again, universal
endorsement of the program seems to emerge naturally, almost deterministically, from the socioeconomic
conditions of the 1950s and 1960s. Additional male bodies were simply needed to do the work of the
economic miracle, and this fundamental fact forged a kind of generalized agreement between the
government, industry, and the media.

Yet it is precisely this rhetoric of uniformity, consensus, and self-evident necessity that requires
examination. The very same men championing the importation of foreign workers in the early 1960s, after
all, had also lived through the Nazi era, under a regime whose government and media had promoted a
national ideology of racial purity. Therefore it seems at least a little strange, a mere two decades later, to
find these officials describing the importation of non-German workers as obviously worthwhile and wholly
advantageous. Of course, it was precisely because the Nazi policies of the 1930s and 1940s had gone so
terribly wrong that this ideological shift became possible and, in fact, necessary. The heavy burden of guilt
inherited by the Federal Republic for the genocide of the Holocaust, committed in the name of a pure
German Volk, made West German leaders anxious to demonstrate a new sense of openness to non-
Germans. In 1964, for instance, Labor Minister Blank explained the recruitment of foreign workers as a
sign of goodwill toward the international community, stating that this program made "the merging of
Europe and the rapprochement between persons of highly diverse backgrounds and cultures in the spirit of
friendship a reality." 29

This is not to suggest that the practice of importing workers to Germany was itself entirely new. 30 Eighty
years earlier, the government of Wilhelm I had also employed foreign laborers, specifically Poles, to
supplement Germany's native workforce. As Ulrich Herbert has argued, the use of Ostvertriebene (that is,
ethnic Germans) immediately after World War II obscured the fact of the nineteenth-century importation of
non-German labor (as well as the Nazi exploitation of Jews, Soviet prisoners of war, and workers from
occupied countries), and thus led Germans to overlook the connection between previous experience and the
postwar recruitment. 31 But I would also suggest that the employment of guest workers in the 1960s
followed a very different set of principles than those at work during the earlier [End Page 50] recruitment
of Polish laborers. While Poles clearly resided outside the boundaries of German identity in the collective
imagination, they were at least European and Christian. Moreover, they were foreigners who had specific
historical and cultural ties to a group within late nineteenth-century parameters of German citizenship-
namely, those Poles absorbed into Prussia as a result of the partitions of the Polish kingdom at the end of
the eighteenth century. 32

By contrast, the Turkish workers who came to the Federal Republic as part of the postwar labor
recruitment were members of a qualitatively different population-a population from a country outside of
Western Europe, which practiced a non-Christian religion and possessed a non-European ethnicity. As far
back as the early Middle Ages, Ottoman Turks represented the primary social and cultural other that served
to define and consolidate Western Europe as a historical whole. 33 To be sure, at the beginning of the
recruitment program, Turks constituted only a small portion of all the laborers coming to West Germany,
and in the 1960s, no one realized that Turks would become the dominant group of guest workers. Yet the
government's policy of broad recruitment and its presentation as an obvious public good allowed the first
tentative steps toward an active effort to import large numbers of people who in many ways violated every
parameter of German identity over the preceding century.

The circumscribed rhetoric used to discuss guest workers in the public sphere partially facilitated this
dramatic turn in German history-the active importation of a traditional geopolitical other within the
boundaries of German society. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more ambiguous-and deeply ambivalent-
rhetorical figure than the guest worker, or one that could have better crystallized the socioeconomic
concerns on the minds of West German officials during the 1960s. This term quite literally defined the
hundreds of thousands of foreign laborers according to utility and time frame. It reduced their presence to
pure economic contribution and insisted on the temporary nature of their stay.

The assumption that guest workers would only remain in the Federal Republic for a short time was initially
built into the structure of recruitment agreements through the principle of rotation. Accordingly, imported
laborers received two-year, nonrenewable work and residence permits. Yet once the recruits embarked on
this cycle of rotation-which included applying for work and residence permits, undergoing training,
working for two years, and returning home-concern for the Federal Republic's economy took absolute
precedence in directing policy. The detrimental effects of rotation quickly became apparent as industry
leaders realized that it cost more money to import new workers every two years than to keep the trained
ones and absorb the minor fluctuations in production demands. 34 With the rotation policy proving
increasingly unprofitable by the mid-1960s, the government largely waived [End Page 51] the rule of quick
return-that is, it almost always granted foreign workers extensions for the residence and work permits,
effectively allowing them to remain in Germany for as long as they liked.

Government leaders nonetheless publicly maintained the official position that made foreign workers in
Germany a temporary presence. As one historian has noted, all of those formally involved with foreign
employment "shared the firm conviction that this was a temporally limited phenomenon, a transitional
development that would eventually disappear." 35 The 1965 Ausländergesetz (Foreigner Law) codified
this stance, outlining special regulations on the rights of work and residence for people from countries
outside the Common Market (e.g., Turkey, Yugoslavia, Greece). Whereas citizens of Common Market
countries enjoyed virtually the same rights in this regard as their German counterparts, a worker from a
non-Common Market country would only be granted a residence permit "if the foreigner's presence does
not adversely affect the interests of the Federal Republic of Germany." 36 The guideline's vague wording-
and specifically its failure to define the phrases "adversely affect" and "interests of the Federal Republic of
Germany"-gave German administrators a great deal of discretionary power. It opened the door for officials
to claim that the long-term presence of any guest worker harmed the interests of West Germany as a nation,
especially if he was no longer needed by the economy. 37

In many ways, the Ausländergesetz served as the quintessential expression of the government's early
position on the guest workers, not only reiterating a decade of public statements about pure labor and
temporary residence, but also inscribing these assumptions into law. The actual practice of recruitment,
however, proved the circumscribed rhetoric around the guest worker incongruous as the Federal Republic
pursued what amounted to a contradictory policy. While it remained publicly steadfast in its insistence
that guest workers would eventually go home, it also continued to renew their visas and extend their
lengths of residence. 38

Early Critics of the Guest Worker Program and the End of the Economic Miracle
Meanwhile, a few isolated critics began to question some of the assumptions at the heart of the public
rhetoric. As early as June 1961, L. Kroeber-Keneth wrote an article for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
that offered one of the first public reflections on the recently coined term guest worker:
The concept of guest worker still sounds foreign, and it is also not without inner contradiction: usually one
does not expect the guest to work for the host, earn money for him, and then spend part of it again. Also,
the "guest" in actual meaning is not thought of as earning the most money in the shortest possible time, so
that he becomes, to one's horror, the "hereditary service people." . . . Only the future can show whether the
expression guest worker will take root. It [End Page 52] cannot be forced. But in any case, it would prove
preferable to and more succinct than "foreign workforces" [ausländische Arbeitskräfte], to say nothing of
the defective and misleading term "alien worker" [Fremdarbeiter]. . . . At any rate, it is not unimportant
with which term, and that is to say from which perspective, we come to an understanding with foreign
workers [ausländischen Arbeiter]. 39

Above all, this is a critique of rhetoric. Guest worker rolls off the tongue more smoothly than foreign
workforces and avoids the tainted association of alien worker (which the Nazis had used for forced
laborers). Yet Kroeber-Keneth also stresses the "inner contradictions" of the term. Guests by definition do
not work-and certainly not for wages. "Hereditary service people," moreover, do not receive the warm
welcome and hospitality usually extended to guests. In both cases, Kroeber-Keneth proves that the rhetoric
itself belies lived experience (as well as common sense). It is this disjuncture between literal and figurative
meanings-official rhetoric and the reality in the factories-that dominates his article. And as the author
implies, the disjuncture in fact exceeds matters of linguistic precision; rhetorical elision was shaping reality
itself. 40
Not surprisingly, the guest workers themselves also expressed dissatisfaction with the Federal Republic's
policy. Heidrun Suhr has observed that almost as soon as the recruitment began in the mid-1950s, migrants
turned to writing as a kind of survival strategy for "coping with a harsh reality"-albeit usually without a
specific plan or even the intention to publish their texts. Most of their views found expression in personal
journals as well as in letters to family and friends at home. 41 A few public venues did exist for workers to
publish their writing, however, particularly among Italians who were the earliest and most active
group in documenting their experiences. Following a long tradition of literature written by Italian
emigrants, many even paid to have short stories, poems, and novels published back home. 42 As early as
1951, Corriere d'Italia, a weekly newspaper for Italian emigrants in the Federal Republic, provided a local
periodical devoted to the voices and concerns of migrant workers. But these published voices were
articulated in Italian, so that they remained largely inaccessible to most Germans. 43
At the same time, several German writers began to incorporate guest workers into their literary texts.
According to Carmine Chiellino, Günther Herburger, who later achieved public recognition in the 1968
student movement, published a short story entitled "Gastarbeiter" in the Stuttgarter Zeitung, perhaps the
first attempt by a German writer to represent the postwar labor recruitment in the literature of the Federal
Republic. 44 It tells the story of a German contractor. On the job, he treats his foreign underlings harshly,
but at home, he must deal with his own daughter's relationship with an Italian laborer, whom she prefers to
"pale little office men." [End Page 53] Although the guest worker in question fails to emerge as anything
more than a shadowy figure, Herburger nevertheless initiated an important cycle. For the first time, a
German author was beginning to challenge-and complicate-the government rhetoric through a literary
medium. Two years later, Hans Werner Richter (founder of Gruppe 47) referred to guest workers in Briefe
aus einem Jahrhundert ins andere [Letters from another century], a satirical meditation on West Germany's
obsession with its economy and the central principles of production and consumption. 45

By the late 1960s, more sustained and increasingly high-profile German critiques began to emerge. The
Swiss writer Max Frisch, for instance, revisited the question of what imported laborers should be called in
1967, asking, "Guest worker or foreign worker?" His answer: "I am for the latter: they are not guests who
one serves, or off of whom one makes money; they work, and in a foreign land, while in their own land
they can by no means prosper. One cannot take offense at that." 46 In contrast to Kroeber-Keneth's earlier
rejection of Fremdarbeiter, Frisch opted for this more literal and less euphemistic choice, even at the cost of
returning to a term associated with Nazi slave labor. A few years later, he drew attention to the central
paradox of the recruitment itself, noting that "we called for workforces, but people came." 47 This
observation exposed the instrumentalization implicit in the practice of recruiting foreign workforces, whose
residence in the Federal Republic was regulated according to economic cycles. At the same time, it
suggested that these workers constituted more than their mere labor potential, people whose very presence
would necessarily have an impact on German society.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film Katzelmacher [Dago], which portrayed a vicious group of working-class
friends and their dealings with a foreign laborer from Greece, serves as another important example of
German criticism. Only his second feature film, it received high praise from critics and garnered several
prizes. 48 A few months later, Günter Wallraff published his first book of reportage on guest workers,
Bilder aus Deutschland-"Gastarbeiter" oder der gewöhnliche Kapitalismus [Images from Germany-"guest
workers" or capitalism as usual], which investigated the living conditions of foreign laborers. The next
year, the broadcasting company West Deutscher Rundfunk (WDR) sponsored a contest inviting its listeners
to propose alternatives to the label guest worker. 49 It received over 32,000 entries, including responses
such as "loyal helpers" (treue Helfer), "Euro-slaves" (Eurosklaven), and "Germany fans" (Germanyfans).
Even in such sarcastic suggestions, one gets the sense of a widespread public uneasiness about the
government's recruitment policy. Germany fans, for instance, can be read as either a wishful caricature of
uncritical foreign workers, or as a pointed critique of a government ideology that quite unironically
presumed a purely beneficial impact on its recruits. This kind of sarcasm surfaced more clearly in entries
like Euro-slaves, which emphasized the obviously exploitative aspects of the recruitment. The contest thus
demonstrated [End Page 54] a growing public awareness of the contradictions at the heart of both the
importation policy and its surrounding rhetoric.
The best-known example of this pattern is Heinrich Böll's 1971 novel, Gruppenbild mit Dame [Group
portrait with lady]. Among the most important West German writers of the postwar period, Böll presented
the story of Leni Pfeiffer, which focused on her relationships with a wide circle of acquaintances, friends,
and lovers, including a Turkish guest worker. Although the novel did not offer much detail on the Turkish
character's experiences, it was wildly successful, and was singled out by the Swedish Academy, which
awarded Böll the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972. The book also became a bestseller with more than a
quarter of a million copies sold by 1974. 50 This was the first time a major writer had expanded the scope
of literary representation to include a guest worker in the day-to-day life of postwar Germany.

At the very same moment, three significant socioeconomic developments dramatically altered the public's
perception of guest workers. The first was a demographic shift in the kinds of laborers coming to the
Federal Republic. More than any other group of laborers, Turks responded overwhelmingly to the
employment opportunities offered by West Germany. 51 This trend, however, did not immediately become
apparent. Only in 1971 did the number of Turkish workers surpass that of laborers from other countries,
and by 1973, the jump was quite striking. In 1970, there were 469,200 Turks in Germany, compared to
573,600 Italians and 514,500 Yugoslavs. By 1971, the Turkish population had risen to 652,800, while the
number of Italians and Yugoslavs remained relatively constant. The pattern continued in 1973, when Turks
numbered 893,600, Italians 622,000, and Yugoslavs 673,300. 52 In the following years, the figures for
Turks coming to Germany continued to increase, whereas those from other countries steadily decreased. 53
Turks, in fact, became the dominant group within the larger category of guest workers-a pattern
recapitulated in the media that increasingly treated Turks and guest workers as one and the same. 54
Second, large numbers of guest workers from many countries began to protest the entrenched pattern of
stratification that they claimed inscribed skill and wage differences along ethnic lines. They also
complained about a lack of leadership and representation in trade unions and factory councils, a situation
that meant that scant attention was paid to their particular concerns. As a result, many guest workers
participated in strikes during the early 1970s. This agitation culminated in the widely publicized wildcat
strike of August-September 1973, a confrontation sparked when five hundred Turkish employees of the
Ford plant in Cologne returned to work late after the summer vacation period only to learn that they
had been fired. 55 During the week-long occupation and forced shutdown of the plant, several violent
clashes occurred. These demonstrations-and their coverage in the mainstream press-presented a rather
menacing image of guest workers to the German public. Rather [End Page 55] than an industrious laborer
necessary for West German prosperity, the weekly magazine Der Spiegel now suggested that the
Gastarbeiter had become an ungrateful agitator in a "Turkish revolt." 56
Finally, the 1972-73 recession brought the Federal Republic's boom economy to a screeching halt, a
downturn that proved much more serious than previous economic slumps because of the worldwide oil
crisis. Sustained unemployment set in for the first time in almost twenty years, and by 1974, more than half
a million West Germans joined the ranks of the jobless. The rise in unemployment focused attention on the
large number of foreign workers, which had reached a peak of 2.595 million in 1973. With more and more
Germans out of work, the public began to call for restrictions on the numbers of imported laborers,
especially Turks. This pattern soon led the government to announce an official halt to all foreign labor
recruitment on November 23, 1973-the so-called Anwerbestopp. 57

Aras ¨Oren, Niyazi, and the Beginnings of Gastarbeiterliteratur

It was at this critical juncture in 1973-with cultural representations of Turks, public debates about their
presence, and German unemployment all on the rise-that Aras Ören published the first installment of his
Berlin Trilogie. Entitled Was will Niyazi in der Naunynstraße [What's Niyazi doing on Naunynstraße],
this cycle of poems not only rejected the basic assumptions about the labor recruitment promoted by
official discourse, but also pushed well beyond the initial counternarratives of the guest worker. Unlike the
earlier representations produced by Italian workers, Ören's was immediately translated into German and
published by a highly respected Berlin press, Rotbuch Verlag. In contrast to the representations produced
by left-leaning German writers and filmmakers, which generally treated foreign laborers in brief terms,
Ören's poetic cycle explored the life of a Turkish laborer over sixty-eight pages. This distinction emerged
clearly in the volume's title, which established a particular subject (Niyazi) within a specific
neighborhood (Berlin's Kreuzberg) and drew public attention to his individual concerns (wollen). Thus,
from his very first literary gesture in German, Ören offered a challenge to the mostly atemporal, rootless,
and faceless guest worker that had dominated public discussions of the recruitment over the previous two
decades.

He added further complexity to this figure by stressing his characters' diverse motivations for migrating
to the Federal Republic. While characters such as Ali sign up to work in Germany because they need to
support their families, others like Sabri San do so because they want to amass enough money to return to
Turkey and open their own businesses. The title character Niyazi Gümüskiliç, a poor laborer from Istanbul,
embraces the chance to work in Germany (which he calls "little America") because he wants to live like a
member of the Western bourgeoisie. Only in such a [End Page 56] place, he assumes, can "everyone have a
car, / modern apartments with bath, / ready-made suits, / nylon shirts / and a girlfriend who kisses him in
public / just like in the movies." 58

Initially, Ören highlights the economic position of guest workers over their ethnic and cultural
identifications. He builds this vision into the very foundation of the poems by structuring them around a
particular place (Naunynstraße) rather than specific characters. The street not only acts as a backdrop for
the comings and goings of the cycle's many characters, but it also marks who they are. Naunynstraße is
located in the heart of Kreuzberg, a neighborhood historically inhabited by Berlin's working class. During
the postwar labor recruitment, this district became a prime settlement area for Turks, one of the few places
where guest workers found landlords willing to rent to them. Naunynstraße thus defined signifies the
socioeconomic status that all of its inhabitants share-regardless of their national origins, family histories, or
cultural traditions. 59

Ören underscores this common socioeconomic position in a series of metaphoric parallels between Niyazi
and his Kreuzberg neighbors, the Kutzers. As Niyazi trudges through the icy cold from Naunynstraße to his
night-shift job, dreaming of "blue fish time" on the Bosphorus, Frau Kutzer lies in bed in her Naunynstraße
apartment, unable to sleep because her feet are frozen blue. As Niyazi passes the hours in an aluminum
factory, Frau Kutzer's mind drifts back to her husband's years in the Borsig industrial yards, where he
tightened axle screws on locomotives and spent his extra money at the Café Bauer. Again and again, Ören
weaves a common thread of proletarian experience. Niyazi and the Kutzers live in the same sorts of
apartments, suffer the same sorts of hardships, and engage in the same sorts of daydreaming. And it is
Naunynstraße that ultimately connects those experiences and dreams. Both figuratively and historically, it
binds these diverse members of the German working class together.

As the poem unfolds, the similarities between Niyazi and the Kutzers extend even further. Frau Kutzer's
family, the Brummels, came to Berlin from East Prussia in the 1880s. Her father, a handworker, set up and
maintained his own smith shop and employed journeymen. With their day-to-day existence assured, the
Brummels entertained aspirations for a grander life, unable to recognize the basic divisions of class and
status that kept them in their place. As Ören explains, "Once in a while they played the gramophone / But
the overtures of Léhar operettas already / were for them imposed doors / to a world, which remained
strange and / full of secrets." 60 The untenability of the Brummel family's bourgeois aspirations becomes
clear in the economic collapse following World War I when the smith shop no longer provides enough
income. Their standing drops even further after Elisabeth Brummel marries Gustav Kutzer, a working-class
mechanic and a member of the Communist Party. [End Page 57]

At this point, Frau Kutzer becomes fully aware of her class position. As the daughter of an independent
small business owner, she had previously spent her days at leisure, listening to music, knitting, or
embroidering. But as the wife of a mechanic who sells his labor for wages, she is now forced to work as a
cleaning lady and grumbles about her sacrifices. By contrast, her husband, outraged at the injustices heaped
on the workers, criticizes the Weimar Republic's social democrats, calling them "bastards of the rich" who
make "golden promises in the name of the workers." Herr Kutzer champions radical communists such as
Rosa Luxemburg and admonishes his wife: "to be a proletarian / is nothing to be ashamed of. / Tomorrow
the proletariat will / overtake power, / and if the proletariat has no fear before its masters, / the masters will
fear the proletariat." 61 In the end, however, Herr Kutzer stifles his communist sympathies in the face of
Nazi persecution-a silence which, Ören suggests, amounts to nothing less than psychological suicide.

Like Frau Kutzer's family, Niyazi also comes to Berlin in search of a better life. In Istanbul, Niyazi led an
impoverished existence as a longshoreman, a position set into stark relief because he happened to live in
the primarily upper-class neighborhood of Bebek along the Bosphorus. He sees his chance to move up by
going to work in Germany, but just as with the Brummel family's aspirations, Niyazi's hopes for living like
the rich do not materialize. He observes, "These seven years have changed a lot with me, / I have
understood, where my place / in society is. / I have a closet full of suits / and I have a car, but / it is not
enough / to wish away the boundaries between those / who eat sweets and meat pies / and those who eat
unripe melons." 62 With this realization, Niyazi becomes an advocate for Berlin's diverse working class.
He asserts that even the lowest worker deserves an equal share of profit for his labor, a position that echoes
the beliefs of the young activist Herr Kutzer. The ideals that Kutzer lacked the courage to see through in the
face of National Socialist oppression ultimately are revived through Niyazi's founding (with his German
neighbor Horst) of a multiethnic socialist club.

In subsequent poems, Ören delineates the ways that Turkish and German laborers are similarly seduced by
industrial capitalism's promise of socioeconomic advancement. Niyazi, for example, explains the futility of
saving wages to his friend Sabri: "What we have saved / without eating, without drinking, without
experiencing anything / will flow into the pockets of others." 63 The single-minded drive to save-often in
hopes of returning home and opening a business-represents a form of blindness that prevents Turkish
workers from understanding their exploitation. A second form of blindness emerges in Ören's discussion of
Sabri's German counterpart, Klaus Feck, who initially defines his social mobility in terms of consumer
goods. Although his wages barely provide him with enough money to survive, he is nonetheless determined
to acquire all the luxuries that he associates with a successful worker. For these-a motorcycle, a color
television, built-in kitchen cabinets, and [End Page 58] furniture-Klaus must work overtime, leaving for the
factory every morning at five o'clock and returning home every evening at six o'clock. The result,
according to Ören, is a growing "consumer chaos" that seeps into all aspects of Klaus's existence. He has
become a materialistic "plow horse" who plods through his work without reflection.
¨Oren, the New Left, and the Lingering Problem of Ethnicity

This ideological program-at once familiar and complex-seems to have grown out of Ören's intellectual and
artistic trajectories during the 1960s. Born near Istanbul in 1939, Ören came to the Federal Republic at the
beginning of the 1960s as part of a Turkish theater troupe for an extended series of performances at the
Frankfurt Neues Theater. He went back to Turkey for mandatory military service but returned to West
Berlin in 1965. Influenced by Brecht's mode of consciousness-raising theater, Ören and several friends
established an artistic collective with the intention of performing plays for guest workers. When the project
collapsed, Ören returned once more to Istanbul, where he continued to act and write plays. In 1969, he
settled permanently in Berlin, working odd jobs until the success of Was will Niyazi made it possible for
him to live as a writer and journalist. 64

Although the precise details of these early years remain somewhat fuzzy, it is clear that Ören had exposure
to many of the ideas and artistic programs we now associate with the German New Left. In fact, the
dominant themes and concerns of Was will Niyazi resemble many of the works that came out of this
milieu, including Fassbinder's Katzelmacher, Wallraff's "Gastarbeiter" oder der gewöhnliche Kapitalismus,
and Böll's Gruppenbild mit Dame. In each case, a similar set of socioeconomic contexts and targets
emerges. Troubled by West Germany's self-congratulatory economic affluence and progressive rhetoric, all
of these artists attacked the social conformity and ideological complacency of the miracle years, pointing to
the widespread recruitment of guest workers as perhaps the most extreme example of the Federal
Republic's uncritical embrace of capitalist prosperity for its own sake. 65

Yet it is also clear that Ören's work added a number of distinctive features to this larger cultural program.
For Fassbinder and Böll, guest workers function as largely abstract figures with little or no individual
identities. In Katzelmacher, the foreign laborer Jorgos remains virtually silent because of his inability to
understand or speak much German, and we learn nothing of his background except that he is from Greece.
Similarly, Mehmet, the Turkish lover of Leni in Gruppenbild mit Dame, only appears a handful of times,
primarily to indicate her uncharacteristic openness to the "outcasts" of German society.

For most of the German New Left, guest workers serve as exoticized victims. Fassbinder, significantly,
played the role of Jorgos himself, a directorial choice that expressed a sort of empathy for the difficulties of
foreign workers, yet ultimately [End Page 59] employed this foreignness as a vehicle for his own feelings
of social and political alienation (rather than those of the immigrant). 66 As he later explained, he did not
set out to make a film about guest workers per se: his bleak representation of Jorgos simply constituted one
of many techniques he used to point out the human and ideological costs of West Germany's unbridled
capitalist growth. 67 This was also true of Wallraff's reportage, which exposed the poor living conditions of
recruited workers but focused its most fundamental critique on a capitalist society in pursuit of "business as
usual" by importing a reserve army of foreigners. Ören's narrative, on the other hand, begins from within
the multiethnic world of workers-giving them agency even as it documents their exploitation-and envisions
a radical transformation of society emerging from below in the form of a united Turkish-German
proletariat. 68

Perhaps the most interesting contrast with Fassbinder, Wallraff, and Böll surfaces in the moments when
Ören specifically addresses the issue of ethnicity. His scenes with the character Ali, in particular,
demonstrate how ethnicity complicates and divides class consciousness. As Ali leaves his job at the
refrigerator assembly plant, he encounters two German colleagues who order him to haul garbage to the
back of the factory before going home. Ali refuses, and the Germans harass him. When Ali returns the
hounding, they become angry and blame him for their economic difficulties: "'Because of you-'/ 'Because
of all of you-'/ '-you dirty foreigners . . . / You do overtime, overtime, there you have it / And we celebrate
Christmas this time without cash, / next week the short-term work will be over.'" 69 In the German version
of the text, the workers' form of address changes, shifting from the familiar singular form of "you"
(deinetwegen) to the familiar plural form (euretwegen)-a move that casts Ali as an ethnic representative-
and finally they explicitly call him and his fellow immigrants "you dirty foreigners" (ihr dreckigen
Ausländer). 70 As Ören makes clear, however, the ethnic tensions are not one-sided. Ali also fails to
recognize the plight he shares with his German colleagues and allows his frustration to boil over into anger
and resentment. On the U-Bahn after the confrontation at the factory, he daydreams about his village: "And
if one day / a German should lose his way there, / Ali decided / to beat him / until his energy drained out of
him-/ for that / which he had to put up with in these days." 71

This revenge fantasy foreshadows a very real-and deadly-brawl between Ali and his coworker Klaus. It all
begins in a remarkable, quasi-hallucinatory scene, during which Ören recounts Klaus's rambling, alcohol-
induced disillusionment with the cultural values of the miracle years: "'Protect our basic free and
democratic constitutional order'- / the newspapers were full of such words. / Along with stories of murder
and pictures of naked women. / 'Protect our free and democratic legal system'- / the television programs
were full of such statements. / Along with advertisements and gangster films." 72 Here liberal values and
democratic rights are juxtaposed [End Page 60] with the ugly consequences of capitalism-the exploitation
of women, a vacuous mass culture, and violence. Indeed, Ören suggests that they are actually two sides of
the same coin: freedom and democracy guarantee free trade and material abundance, yet the exploitation of
society's most vulnerable groups sustains that very system. As a member of a working class seduced into
spending his hard-earned wages on consumer junk, Klaus recognizes that he receives no benefits from the
values he cherishes. He asks himself, "What do these have to do with me? What do I gain from them? /
What do I understand about them? / I am suffocating." 73

At this very moment, Klaus spies his coworker Ali on the street and beckons his friend to join him for a
drink. Inside the bar, however, mutualism gives way to violence, as Klaus shouts, "'What is standing
around here so stupidly? / Can't you even chitchat properly / dirty foreigner, what do you really want
here?'" 74 This rapid disintegration of Ali's subjectivity in Klaus's eyes marks the tragic breakdown of the
working-class solidarity envisioned in the earlier scenes with Niyazi and the Kutzers. Once again, a
linguistic shift in the poem (from "who" to "what") signals ethnic division, but this time a more
fundamental failure to communicate accompanies it. Citing Ali's inability to "chitchat properly," Klaus
questions the Turk's very presence in a traditional working-class space and lashes out with violence. As
Klaus fully realizes his own oppression, he seizes on Ali's difference as a kind of ideological compensation.
Finally, he punches Ali, mumbling to himself: "Don't cower / before anyone, not even yourself." 75

At the scene's climax, an eerie specter emerges: "In their hands no sub-machine guns. / On their heads no
steel helmets, / on their feet no boots, / they wore no brown uniforms / and no swastikas. / They were seven
or eight men, / the others in the bar. / The arms tattooed pale blue, / patent leather shoes, / and their
thoughts nourished a snake / that spit unhindered poison. / And they all / agreed with Klaus, / they shared a
common joy. / They went to work on Monday with ease." 76 What makes this passage so powerful is
Ören's invocation of images of Nazi terror even as he acknowledges that these men are not Nazis. He
clearly states that these shadowy figures did not carry machine guns, did not wear helmets, boots, brown
uniforms, or swastikas. And yet, the negative parallel serves to invoke the comparison as much as weaken
it.

I would suggest that these disturbing images can be read in a number of different ways. On one level, Ören
juxtaposes the destructive effects of capitalism with images commonly linked to fascism-a linkage entirely
typical of the German New Left. As Andrei Markovits and Philip Gorski have argued, the 1968 student
protest movement in the Federal Republic took on a specifically German character deeply connected to the
"Holocaust effect": what emerged was "a critique of the complacency and accommodation of the Bonn
republic's institutions and political culture vis-à-vis the Nazi regime." 77 In Katzelmacher's opening
epigraph, for instance, Fassbinder [End Page 61] warns his audience that "it is better to make new mistakes
than to reconstitute the old ones ad nauseam." Wallraff's exposé on the conditions of guest workers
similarly culminates with the troubling revelation that a German company housed its imported laborers in
the barracks of the former concentration camp Dachau. Ören makes this connection by invoking the
menacing apparition of tattooed men with patent leather shoes at exactly those moments when the
realization of economic inequity and exploitation leads to violence against foreigners. He suggests that such
connections are fundamental to the ideological legacy that has infected the minds of Klaus and Ali's other
German coworkers.

But Ören also takes the connection between capitalism and fascism in new directions. First and foremost,
he uses this association to point out the tragic consequences of the German working class's failure to see its
own misery as fundamentally linked to that of Turkish guest workers. At the same time, Ören stresses that
this neo-Nazi specter is not outfitted in brown shirts, steel helmets, or swastikas-it is not the fascism of the
Third Reich. This makes the violence all the more tragic. In spite of their similar work experiences, mutual
economic complaints, and shared public spaces in Kreuzberg, the "poisonous snake" seems to emerge with
distressing ease. Ören thus reaffirms and complicates the conventional critiques of the German New Left.
In this case, a fascist mentality functions not merely as an ideological legacy elided and ignored in the
name of economic rebuilding; it also marks the ethnic essentialism of exploited workers unable to
recognize their common plight.

Epilogue:
Imagining a German Multiculturalism

At the time of its publication, Was will Niyazi was widely heralded by German critics as a major cultural
milestone. Here, they suggested, was the first literary work by a Turk to explain why the guest workers had
come to West Germany, what they had experienced, how they had survived. 78 In his review for the
Nürnberger Nachrichten, Ludwig Fels went even further, proposing an entirely different sort of
accomplishment: "I regard this volume as a secret bestseller: whoever reads it will no longer be able to
think in the old way." 79 This bold claim suggested that Ören had produced a radical change not simply in
the conventions of artistic representation, but also in the perceptions of German readers. Emphasizing the
volume's "socially critical lesson," Fels pointed to its final poem, a quote from a Turkish worker's letter to
his German colleague that reiterates their shared status as human beings and workers. For Fels, this was
Ören's crucial contribution-an extension of the New Left's critique of capitalist society to include "all the
Niyazis in all the Naunynstraßes," which in turn made it increasingly difficult to pigeonhole guest workers
in the "old ways" (either as pure labor forces or as pure victims). [End Page 62]

Some twelve years later, Yüksel Pazarkaya, another prominent Turkish- German intellectual, paid tribute to
Ören in an essay marking his receipt of the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize. With the publication of Was will
Niyazi, Pazarkaya explained, "a wave of enthusiasm swept the German critics. They recognized in the
verses of this poem an original, powerful, yet tender, matter-of-fact, but also graphic, descriptive, and at the
same time unmediated experiential . . . voice." 80 This emphasis on authorial immediacy as the key to
Ören's popularity with the German critics is instructive. What it seems to suggest is a twofold innovation.
On the one hand, Pazarkaya here casts Ören as a newly authentic critical representative, one who (unlike
his New Left counterparts) shares certain perspectives, experiences, and hardships with his literary
subjects. On the other hand, the notion that Ören's literary voice could now speak directly to an audience
across boundaries of ethnicity, class, and region underscores the unprecedented ways in which his work
was being distributed. Paradoxically, by circulating his poems within the literary marketplace, Ören
effected a kind of cross-ethnic immediacy that struck his German readers as fundamentally new and
important.

This enthusiastic reception dramatically transformed Ören's career. In 1973, Ören had been virtually
unknown to the German reading public, prompting Fels to describe his poetic cycle as a "secret bestseller."
Yet, on the strength of such accolades, the West Berlin radio and television station Sender Freies Berlin
(SFB) quickly adapted the story for television. 81 Soon thereafter, SFB hired Ören as editor in chief of a
thirty-minute daily news and cultural radio program, the first Turkish-language broadcast of any kind in
the Federal Republic. This new position brought Ören's role as public intellectual full circle. By directing
Was will Niyazi toward a German-language readership, Ören had expanded the public's consciousness of
the Turkish community and initiated a collective rethinking of its representation in the public sphere. This,
in turn, led SFB to widen its programming parameters to include both Ören's literary and journalistic work,
giving him access to a German mass audience as well as a more extensive voice among Turks. For the first
time, a member of West Germany's largest minority group was beginning to question and redefine the
boundaries of German identity in a mass cultural medium.

It is worth noting, though, that Ören's methods of questioning were in continuous flux during this period of
growing celebrity. Even in the closing pages of Was will Niyazi, one senses the beginnings of a major shift.
At this point, it exists as unresolved doubts about the volume's original utopian vision. Despite the tragic
fight that results in Klaus's death, Ören depicts Niyazi and Horst vowing to unite the neighborhood through
common labor concerns and grassroots political activities. Yet the specter of fascism haunts these final
lines, serving as a kind of reminder that workers are never exclusively economic beings and that ethnic
differences drive worker consciousness [End Page 63] just as powerfully as common experiences in a
Kreuzberg apartment building, factory, or tavern.

A year later, Ören expanded the boundaries of his project further, adding new dimensions to his portrait of
the guest worker experience in the second volume of the trilogy. Entitled Der kurze Traum aus Kagithane
[The fleeting dream from Kagithane], this installment re-presents the historical origins of the labor
recruitment, focusing attention on the lives of Turkish workers well before their arrival in Germany.
Ören's setting is the Istanbul district of Kagithane, a shantytown that literally sprang up as the result of
hundreds of thousands of rural villagers pouring into the city to apply for work in the Federal Republic.
This new chronological and geographical orientation emphasized the fact that, for many Turkish laborers,
the first phase of migration occurred when they moved from the rural regions of Turkey to Istanbul. It also
marked a clear departure from the representational conventions of the 1960s. From Herburger's
"Gastarbeiter" to Fassbinder's Jorgos, earlier artists had routinely depicted guest workers as historical
ciphers, devoid of any pre-German past, whereas Ören now insisted that the lives of Turkish laborers in the
Federal Republic could not be understood without tracing the full trajectory of their migration and the
difficult process of transplanting village culture to an urban-industrial context.

In 1980, Ören published the trilogy's final installment, Die Fremde ist auch ein Haus [A foreign country is
also a home]. Here Ören concentrates on Turkish laborers who have lived in the Federal Republic for many
years, with no plans to resettle in Turkey. 82 His portrayal of a de facto permanent non-German residence-a
situation occurring more and more frequently in the late 1970s and early 1980s-explicitly problematized the
assumption of a homogeneous German society underlying the original conception of the guest worker. One
of the central characters in this poetic cycle is Kemal, a Turkish laborer who has lived with his family in
Kreuzberg for nearly a decade. As the family prepares to vacation in Turkey, a conflict arises between
Kemal and his fifteen-year-old daughter Emine which illustrates the very different relationship each figure
has to Germany. Ören describes Kemal as a Heimaturlauber (homeland vacationer), a term that captures
the complexity of Kemal's status in both countries. The juxtaposition of Heimat (implying the rootedness
and stability of one's home) and Urlauber (denoting a temporary visit) demonstrates a transmutation of the
original expectation that Turkish workers would return to their homeland permanently once the short-term
need for their labor in the Federal Republic was met. Turkey may still be Kemal's homeland as a cultural
reference point, but in actual practice, it has become merely a vacation destination.

In contrast to her father, Emine perceives Germany as her "real" home and Turkey as a place for holidays.
She explains her feelings in a letter addressed to the [End Page 64] Turkish general consulate and Berlin's
interior minister: "Foreignness already began at home, but my father / called it 'Germany.' / I now call it
'Turkey.' / When I came here, I was five years old. / I have been here for ten years, my brothers / were born
in Berlin. / Where is my foreign country now, where is my homeland? / The foreign country of my father
has become my homeland. / My homeland is the foreign country of my father." 83 Despite the radically
different ways that Kemal and Emine identify with Germany and Turkey, they share a passport that gives
them the same legal status-German residents, but Turkish citizens. Yet for Emine, this reliance on blunt
binary distinctions between Heimat and Fremde has long ago ceased to make any sense. Her letter
expresses a practical desire for citizenship status consistent with lived experience, as well as a growing
frustration with essentialized notions of identity. This attempt to become German legally underscores the
fact that Emine already thinks of herself as German socially and culturally. 84

For any contemporary reader of Die Fremde ist auch ein Haus, the disjunction between Emine's request and
the German citizenship laws must have been clear. In 1980 naturalization required at least ten years of
full-time residence in the Federal Republic, oral and written mastery of German, the ability to support
oneself and one's dependents, renunciation of Turkish citizenship and any potential inheritance in that
country, and good "moral character" demonstrated by "leading an irreproachable life." 85 The process was
so complicated and arduous that few actually attempted it. The same year that the trilogy's final installment
was published, only 387 Turks were naturalized-or 0.1 percent of Turks who had lived in West
Germany for more than ten years. 86 Ören's poetic cycle, therefore, challenged the very basis of German
identity's official formulation. Emine embodied a new, more fluid Germanness-a Germanness now insisting
on hybrid affiliations far more complex than the social categories wielded by first-generation Turks (like
her father) and the Germans in the passport office.

Ören's significance for the public discourse on the guest worker, then, extended well beyond debunking a
few specific stereotypes, offering a Turkish point of view, or even documenting key changes in the history
of the migration. Between 1973 and 1980, Ören's work simultaneously registered and helped to initiate
three major shifts in the German public's most basic attitudes: first, by insisting on the interconnectedness
of workers' economic and ethnic identities; second, by expanding the spatial and temporal parameters of the
migration experience; and finally, by challenging the fundamental dichotomy of native and foreign that had
long served as the ideological bedrock for debates about citizenship. One might even argue that Ören's
choice of a female protagonist in his final installment once again prefigured a critical juncture. Just as the
experiences and concerns of Emine came to dominate Die Fremde ist auch ein Haus, public discussions
during the 1980s began to focus on [End Page 65] gender issues (e.g., headscarves, domestic violence,
spatial regulations), which in turn served as the new ideological tools for debating the integration of
Turkish families now acknowledged as permanent residents.

Ultimately, Ören's progression from Was will Niyazi to Die Fremde ist auch ein Haus also involved a
change in modes of cultural criticism: from a New Left critique of the Federal Republic told from a
Turkish-German perspective to a much broader, transnational reconceptualization of German identity and
culture itself-one which we might describe today as "multicultural." It is important to note that when the
final volume of the Berlin Trilogie came out in 1980, the actual term multiculturalism still remained
relatively uncommon in Germany. 87 At this point, the bulk of public debate centered on the continuing
presence of large numbers of guest workers, with some critics urging repatriation and others championing
various models of integration. Yet I would suggest that Ören, in the course of writing his trilogy, began to
imagine-perhaps even theorize-a distinctly German mode of multiculturalism: a story of perpetually
hyphenated lives and identities; transnational histories, gender roles, and cultural affiliations; and
seemingly obsolete citizenship laws that remain hotly contested even today.

Rita C.-K. Chin is assistant professor of history at Oberlin College. She teaches courses on Central Europe,
transnationalism, and cultural and intellectual history. She is currently completing her book Imagining a
Multicultural Germany: Immigration, Minority Artists, and the Expansion of National Identity, 1955-1990.
Notes
To avoid clutter and redundancy, quotation marks do not appear around "guest worker" in the text. I take it
as a given that this term carries a great deal of ideological freight in the German public sphere and has been
regularly constructed, refashioned, and contested since its reemergence. I am grateful to Jay Cook for
insightful criticism, key suggestions, and countless readings of this piece. I also thank Marcia Colish, Geoff
Eley Gerald Feldman, Martin Jay, Wendy Kozol, Isaac Miller, and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful
comments.

1. Marios Nikolinakos, Politische Ökonomie der Gastarbeiterfrage: Migration und Kapitalismus (Reinbek:
Rowohlt, 1973); Ray C. Rist, Guestworkers in Germany: The Prospects for Pluralism (New York: Praeger,
1978); Klaus Unger, Ausländerpolitik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Saarbrücken: Breitenbach,
1980).

2. Peter Seibert, "Zur 'Rettung der Zungen': Ausländerliteratur in ihren konzeptionellen Ansätzen,"
Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 56 (1984): 40-61; Arlene Teraoka,
"Gastarbeiterliteratur: The Other Speaks Back," Cultural Critique 7 (1987): 77-101; Heidrun Suhr,
"Ausländerliteratur: Minority Literature in the Federal Republic of Germany," New German Critique 46
(1989): 71-103. Early anthropologies also fall into this pattern. See Ruth Mandel, "'We Called for
Manpower, but People Came Instead': The Foreigner Problem and Turkish Guestworkers in West
Germany" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1988).

3. John Toews, "Intellectual History Takes a Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the
Irreducibility of Experience," American Historical Review 92.4 (1987): 879-907; Lynn Hunt, ed., The New
Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Sarah Maza, "Stories in History: Cultural
Narratives in Recent Works in European History," American Historical Review 101.5 (1996): 1493-1515.

4. Marilya Veteto-Conrad, Finding a Voice: Identity and the Works of German-Language Turkish Writers
in the Federal Republic of Germany to 1990 (New York: Lang, 1996). This approach stands in contrast to
that taken by Peter Seibert, Arlene Teraoka, and Heidrun Suhr, who have divided the genre into three
categories: political literature aimed at fostering solidarity among workers; literature to promote cultural
exchange; and literature bound by aesthetic characteristics based on social, economic, and political
differences. Suhr, "Ausländerliteratur," 79.

5. Suhr briefly acknowledged the multicultural implications of Ören's trilogy in 1989. Suhr,
"Ausländerliteratur," 86-87.
6. Quoted in Alan Kramer, The West German Economy: 1945-1955 (New York: Berg, 1991), 1.
7. Ibid., 163.
8. Henry A. Turner Jr., Germany from Partition to Reunification (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1992), 110; Rist, Guestworkers in Germany, 110. For detailed accounts of the economic miracle, see H. C.
Wallich, Mainsprings of the German Revival (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955) and Eric
Owen Smith, The West German Economy (New York: St. Martin's, 1983).

9. Robert Moeller, Protecting Motherhood: Women and the Family in the Politics of Postwar West
Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Elizabeth Heineman, What Difference Does a
Husband Make? Women and Marital Status in Nazi and Postwar Germany (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999).

10. Ulrich Herbert, A History of Foreign Labor in Germany, 1880-1980: Seasonal Workers/Forced
Laborers/Guest Workers, trans. William Templer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 195-
201. On the social history of refugees and expellees, see Albrecht Lehmann, Im Fremden ungewollt
zuhaus: Flüchtlinge und Vertriebene in Westdeutschland, 1945-1990 (Munich: Beck, 1991); Klaus J. Bade,
ed., Neue Heimat im Westen: Vertriebene, Flüchtlinge, Aussiedler (Münster: Westfälischer Heimatbund,
1990).

11. Roy E. H. Mellor, The Two Germanies: A Modern Geography (New York: Harper and Row, 1978),
188-89.

12. Herbert, History of Foreign Labor in Germany, 209-10.

13. "Volksbeschäftigung-Die dritte Garnitur," Der Spiegel, August 19, 1959, 26. Quoted in Herbert,
History of Foreign Labor in Germany, 210.
14. It is worth noting that by the late 1960s, West Germany also began to recruit women guest workers. See
Yüksel Pazarkaya, "Stimmen des Zorns und der Einsamkeit in Bitterland: Wie die Bundesrepublik
Deutschland zum Thema der neuen türkischen Literatur wurde," Zeitschrift für Kulturaustausch 35 (1985):
18.

15. Herbert, History of Foreign Labor in Germany, 205-13. See also Rist, Guestworkers in Germany, 137-
38. The Federal Republic also signed more restricted labor agreements with Japan (1956); Morocco (1963);
Tunisia (1965); and Korea (1970). For this, see Heather Booth, The Migration Process in Britain and West
Germany (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 1992), 110.

16. Verena McRae, Die Gastarbeiter: Daten, Fakten, Probleme (Munich: Beck, 1980), 13-15.

17. Bundesanstalt für Arbeit, ed., Anwerbung, Vermittlung, Beschäftigung ausländischer Arbeitnehmer:
Erfahrungsbericht 1963 (Nuremberg: Bundesanstalt für Arbeit, 1964), 6. See also Stephen Castles, Heather
Booth, and Tina Wallace, Here for Good: Western Europe's New Ethnic Minorities (London: Pluto, 1987),
132-37.

18. Owen Smith, West German Economy, 162-63.

19. Companies were legally compelled to provide lodging for foreign workers. See Stephen Castles and
Godula Kosack, Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in Western Europe (London: Oxford University
Press, 1973), 245. A study of the residential patterns of Turks in Cologne shows that most company
barracks were located far from neighborhood centers or public transport. See John Clark, "Residential
Patterns and Social Integration of Turks in Cologne," in Manpower Mobility across Cultural Boundaries:
Social, Economic, and Legal Aspects, ed. R.E. Krane (Leiden: Brill, 1975), 61-75.

20. Herbert claims that the West German press gave significant attention to the poor living conditions of
guest workers in these hostels, but notes that it did not address their working conditions or status under
German law. As I argue below, this kind of public interest represented the exception rather than the rule.
Herbert, History of Foreign Labor in Germany, 218-20.

21. Ibid., 210. See also Rist, Guestworkers in Germany, 110.

22. "Über 800,000 Ausländer beschäftigt," Bulletin des Presse- und Informationsamtes der
Bundesregierung, 1963, no. 117.

23. "Die Beschäftigung erreicht einen neuen Höchststand," Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, July 15, 1963.

24. Initial costs were substantial and included a recruitment fee of DM 300 per worker, travel fare from the
German border to the new residence, medical exams, translation services, on-the-job training, and housing.
Gottfried E. Völker, "Labor Migration: Aid to the West German Economy?" in Krane, Manpower Mobility,
21.

25. Herbert, History of Foreign Labor in Germany, 212-13.

26. Hans Stirn, ed., Ausländische Arbeiter im Betrieb: Ergebnisse der Betriebserfahrung (Frechen:
Bartman, 1964), 47. Quoted in Herbert, History of Foreign Labor in Germany, 212.

27. For an alternative reading of this photo, see Gail Wise, "Ali in Wunderland: German Representations of
Foreign Workers" (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1995), 12-13.

28. Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, Ausländer: Informationen zur politischen Bildung 201 (Bonn:
Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 1984), 3-4. Quoted in Wise, "Ali in Wunderland," 15-16.

29. Quoted in Herbert, History of Foreign Labor in Germany, 213.

30. Herbert, 9-86. See also Klaus J. Bade, ed., Deutsche im Ausland-Fremde in Deutschland: Migration in
Geschichte und Gegenwart (Munich: Beck, 1992).

31. Herbert, History of Foreign Labor in Germany, 195-201.

32. Germany already had a sizable population of Poles who were citizens of the Reich due to the partitions
of the Kingdom of Poland in 1772, 1794, 1795 by Prussia, Austria, and Russia. William W. Hagen,
Germans, Poles, and Jews: The Nationality Conflict in the Prussian East, 1772-1914 (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1980). See also Margaret L. Anderson, Windthorst: A Political Biography (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1981); Helmut Walser Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict:
Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1871-1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Christoph
Klessmann, Polnische Bergarbeiter im Ruhrgebiet 1870-1945 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht,
1978).

33. In the Middle Ages, the otherness of Islam was defined primarily in terms of religion. John Victor
Tolan, ed., Medieval Christian Perceptions of Islam: A Book of Essays (New York: Garland, 1996). For
more recent constructions of Islam and Turkishness in the Western imagination, see Andrew Wheatcroft,
The Ottomans (London: Viking, 1993); Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978).

34. Marilyn Hoskin and Roy C. Fitzgerald, "German Immigration Policy and Politics," in The Gatekeepers:
Comparative Immigration Policy, ed. Michael C. LeMay (New York: Praeger, 1989), 97-98.

35. Herbert, History of Foreign Labor in Germany, 213.

36. The whole of paragraph 2, dealing with residence permits, reads: "Foreigners who enter the sovereign
area of this law and want to reside therein need a residence permit. The residence permit is allowed to be
issued if the foreigner's presence does not adversely affect the interests of the Federal Republic of
Germany." The Ausländergesetz is reprinted in its entirety in McRae, Die Gastarbeiter, 180-91.

37. Rist, Guestworkers in Germany, 135-36.

38. Between 1960 and 1965, the percentage of migrants from Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Turkey leaving
Germany amounted to less than 12 percent of the total of each resident population. See Booth, Migration
Process in Britain, 160, Table 4. Italian workers were the exception, returning to their homeland at a rate
close to 50 percent during each of these years. As citizens of a Common Market country, Italians were not
affected by restrictions on West German labor importation.

39. L. Kroeber-Keneth, "Die ausländischen Arbeitskräfte und wir," Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June
3, 1961.
40. On the fraught meanings of the term guest worker, see Nikolinakos, Politische Ökonomie, 7-8; Franco
Biondi and Rafik Schami, "Literatur der Betroffenheit: Bemerkungen zur Gastarbeiterliteratur," in Zu
Hause in der Fremde: Ein bundesdeutsches Ausländer-Lesebuch, ed. Christian Schaffernicht (Fischerhude:
Atelier im Bauernhaus, 1981), 134; Carmine Chiellino, Am Ufer der Fremde: Literatur und
Arbeitsmigration, 1870-1991 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995), 285-89.

41. Suhr marks the beginning of guest worker literature with these first informal writings. Suhr,
"Ausländerliteratur," 76-78.

42. Biondi and Schami, "Literatur der Betroffenheit," 132; Francesco Loriggio, ed., Social Pluralism and
Literary History: The Literature of the Italian Emigration (Toronto: Guernica, 1996); Carmine Chiellino,
Am Ufer der Fremde, especially Part I; Gino Chiellino, Literatur und Identität in der Fremde: Zur Literatur
italienischer Autoren in der Bundesrepublik (Kiel: Neuer Malik, 1989); Peter Siebert,
"'Gastarbeiterliteratur'-und was darunter verstanden wird," Informationen Deutsch als Fremdsprache 3
(1985): 198-207.
43. The earliest Turkish examples are poems by Yüksel Pazarkaya in the Turkish-language IG-Metall
newspaper from 1965 and 1966, and a short story entitled "Almanya, Almanya" by Nevzat Üstün from
1965. See Pazarkaya, "Stimmen des Zorns," 17-18.

44. Günther Herburger, "Gastarbeiter," Stuttgarter Zeitung, December 31, 1963. For more on Herburger's
story, see Carmine Chiellino, Am Ufer der Fremde, 203-4.

45. In Hans Werner Richter, Menschen in freundlicher Umgebung (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1966), 25-45. On
Richter, see Keith Bullivant and C. Jane Rice, "Reconstruction and Integration: The Culture of West
German Stabilization 1945 to 1968," in German Cultural Studies: An Introduction, ed. Rob Burns (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1995), 222.

46. Max Frisch, Öffentlichkeit als Partner (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1967), 100. Quoted in Mandel, 24.
47. Max Frisch, Die Tagebücher, 1949-1966 und 1966-1971 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), 416.

48. Fassbinder's film was based on a play of the same name, which had its premiere in 1968. Thomas
Elsaesser, Fassbinder's Germany: History, Identity, Subject (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,
1996), 45-46.

49. Ernst Klee, ed., Gastarbeiter: Analyse und Berichte (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972), 149-57.

50. Reinhard K. Zachau, Heinrich Böll: Forty Years of Criticism (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1994),
83, 88.
51. While other groups of foreign workers tended to repatriate after several years, Turks stayed in large
numbers due to a particularly dire economic and political situation at home. Mandel, "We Called for
Manpower," 43-45.
52. For the 1970 figures, see Statistisches Jahrbuch für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Stuttgart:
Kohlhammer, 1971), 42. For the 1971 figures, see Statistisches Jahrbuch (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1973),
52. For the 1973 figures, see Statistisches Jahrbuch (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1974), 51.
53. The number of Turks who remained in the Federal Republic exceeded those from other countries. By
September 30, 1973, nearly 297,000 Turks had been living in West Germany for at least four years, of
which 37,300 had resided there for more than ten years. See Statistisches Jahrbuch (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer,
1974), 51.

54. Examples include: Ernst Klee, "Die Nigger Europas," Frankfurter Rundschau, January 16, 1971; "Ein
Arbeitsplatz in der Bundesrepublik," Vorwärts, April 19, 1973, 18-19; and Bundesanstalt für Arbeit,
"Beschäftigung von Ausländern: Arbeitsplätze in Deutschland oder in der Heimat?" Bayernkurier,
December 22, 1973, 12-13. On the conflation of guest workers with Turks, see Sabine von Dirke,
"Multikulti: The German Debate on Multiculturalism," German Studies Review 17 (1994): 523; Leslie
Adelson, "Migrants' Literature or German Literature? TORKAN's Tufan: Brief an einen islamischen
Bruder," German Quarterly 63 (1990): 383-84.

55. On the wildcat strikes of 1973, see Mark J. Miller, Foreign Workers in Western Europe: An Emerging
Political Force (New York: Praeger, 1981), 104-11.

56. "Faden gerissen," Der Spiegel, September 10, 1973.

57. On unemployed West Germans, see Turner, Germany from Partition to Reunification, 164-65; on
public concerns about the numbers of guest workers, see Herbert, History of Foreign Labor in Germany,
230.

58. Aras Ören, "Niyazi zieht Bilanz," in Was will Niyazi in der Naunynstraße (Berlin: Rotbuch, 1973), 25
(hereafter cited as WWN).
59. For an interpretation of the Berlin Trilogie as part of the "city literature" genre, see Gil Gott,
"Migration, Ethnicization and Germany's New Ethnic Minority Literature" (Ph.D. diss., University of
California at Berkeley, 1994), 162-95.
60. Ören, "Ein Blick auf Frau Kutzers Familiengeschichte," in WWN, 14.
61. Ören, "War Frau Kutzer glücklich?" in WWN, 18.
62. Ören, "Niyazi zieht Bilanz," in WWN, 26.
63. Ören, "Ein Stück ihres Dialogs," in WWN, 40.
64. Very little biographical information has been published on Ören. The most detailed account is "Seeman
in der Wasserlache," Tip, July 8-21, 1977.

65. Andrei S. Markovits and Philip S. Gorski, The German Left: Red, Green, and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1993), 4-18.

66. On Fassbinder's decision to play the role of Jorgos, see Wise, "Ali in Wunderland," 32-36. On
Fassbinder's use of immigrant characters, see Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (London:
Routledge, 1992).
67. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, "Gespräche mit Rainer Werner Fassbinder," in Rainer Werner Fassbinder:
Werkschau (Berlin: Argon, 1992), 36.

68. Ören practices a kind of cultural ventriloquism here too. Like Fassbinder's Jorgos, Niyazi's working-
class words are formulated by a leftist intellectual (rather than a worker). Yet it is also clear that Ören's
critique emerged from a very different cultural position than Fassbinder's: whereas Jorgos functions as a
silent, foreign victim, Niyazi both demonstrates and articulates a vast range of guest worker experiences
and concerns.
69. Ören, "Nermins Mann Ali und die Sache, weshalb Ali nicht nach Hause kam," in WWN, 51.

70. For a sophisticated discussion of racialized scapegoating in the United States., see David R. Roediger,
The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991).
On the interrelation of class and ethnicity in Germany, see Hoskin and Fitzgerald, "German Immigration
Policy," 110-11; Klaus J. Bade, "Immigration and Social Peace in United Germany," Daedalus 123 (1994):
85-106.
71. Ören, "Nermins Mann Ali," 52.
72. Ören, "Konsumchaos und wie Klaus Feck erstickte," in WWN, 47.
73. Ibid., 48.
74. Ibid.
75. Ibid.
76. Ibid., 48-49. The first three lines of this stanza also appear just before Ali's confrontation with his
German colleagues over the garbage. Ören, "Nermins Mann Ali," 51.

77. Markovits and Gorski, German Left, 21.

78. Anneliese Gottschalk, "Dichter der Gastarbeiter," Berliner Stimme, January 29, 1972; "'Nur wenn man
wie ein Amerikaner lebt, kann der Mensch sagen, er habe gelebt,'" Frankfurter Rundschau, June 2, 1973;
Ingeborg Drewitz, "Poem von den Kreuzberger Türken," Tagesspiegel, December 16, 1973.

79. Ludwig Fels, "Geheimer Bestseller: Aras Örens 'Was will Niyazi in der Naunynstraße'-Ein türkischer
Gastarbeiter," Nürnberger Nachrichten, October 13-14, 1973.

80. Yüksel Pazarkaya, "Über Aras Ören," in Chamissos Enkel: Zur Literatur von Ausländern in
Deutschland, ed. Heinz Friedrich (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1986), 15.

81. Harald Dieter Budde, "Leben in Klein-Amerika: Ein neuer Fernsehfilm über Gastarbeiter," Spontan,
1973, 48. The production was renamed "Frau Kutzer and the Other Inhabitants of Naunynstraße," a curious
decision that may have reflected network attempts to reach a broader audience. But it is also true that Ören
figured prominently in the final production, reading his work on camera at various points in the story.

82. Contrary to the expectations of West German leaders, the Anwerbestopp spurred an increase of Turks,
who applied to bring their families before any other restrictive legislation could be passed. This strategy
was made possible by a ruling of the West German courts, which claimed that guest workers' basic human
rights entitled them not to be separated from family for undue periods.

83. Ören, "Die Fremde ist auch ein Haus," in Die Fremde ist auch ein Haus (Berlin: Rotbuch, 1980), 66.

84. One could of course interpret Emine's resistance here in feminist terms-that is, as a young woman's
resistance to the gender roles imposed by Turkish traditions. Yet this reading flirts with ethnocentrism:
after all, it is in opposition to essentialized notions of national and ethnic identity (e.g., "German"
womanhood as fundamentally more "progressive" in what it allows) that Emine seems to be reacting.

85. Gerald L. Neuman, "Nationality Law in the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany:
Structure and Current Problems," in Paths to Inclusion: The Integration of Migrants in the United States
and Germany, ed. Peter Schuck and Rainer Münz (New York: Berghahn, 1998), 264-65. These
requirements are delineated in Section 8 of the 1913 Nationality Act. As Neuman notes, the law does not
entitle a person to naturalization, but rather empowers officials to grant naturalization at their discretion.
The Federal Naturalization Guidelines of 1977 indicate that "the personal wishes and economic interests of
the applicant do not suffice to justify naturalization" and also contain the famous assertion that "the Federal
Republic of Germany is not a country of immigration."

86. Castles, Booth, and Wallace, Here for Good, 84.

87. The first German invocation of multiculturalism that I have found is from 1978. But this term did not
gain common currency until at least 1988, when a widespread public debate emerged around the notion of
the Federal Republic as a multicultural society. I discuss this process in my forthcoming book, Imagining
a Multicultural Germany: Immigration, Minority Artists, and the Expansion of National Identity,
1955-1990.