Turkish Guest Workers in Germany: Hidden Lives and Contested Borders, 1960s–1980s by Jennifer A. Miller, and: Turkish Germans in the Federal Republic of Germany: Immigration, Space, and Belonging, 1961–1990 by Sarah Thomsen Vierra

Reviewed by: Turkish Guest Workers in Germany: Hidden Lives and Contested Borders, 1960s–1980s by Jennifer A. Miller, and: Turkish Germans in the Federal Republic of Germany: Immigration, Space, and Belonging, 1961–1990 by Sarah Thomsen Vierra Lauren Stokes Turkish Guest Workers in Germany: Hidden Lives and Contested Borders, 1960s–1980s. By Jennifer A. Miller. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. Pp. 228. Cloth $85.00. ISBN 978-1487502324. Turkish Germans in the Federal Republic of Germany: Immigration, Space, and Belonging, 1961–1990. By Sarah Thomsen Vierra. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. 282. Cloth $105.00. ISBN 978-1108427302. The two books under review each use distinctive source bases and focus on different periods, but both use approaches drawn from social history and the history of everyday life as a means of placing the agency of Turkish workers and their descendants at the [End Page 642] center of their analysis. Turkish citizens have been the largest group of foreigners in the Federal Republic since 1973, and these two books prove that they have also been actors in German history. Jennifer Miller's Turkish Guest Workers offers a social history of the first generation, with the bulk of the narrative taking place during the period of active labor recruitment from 1961 to 1973. Miller reads official sources against the grain and draws on oral histories and memoirs in order to write a kind of collective biography of the guest worker. The first two chapters are about what happens before the workers even arrive in West Germany, underlining the fact that immigration begins as emigration. Would-be migrants made a substantial investment to have the chance to work in Germany—for example, women had to work an average of 128 hours in Turkey just to pay for the application fees (47). Their first impressions of their new home came as they saved or borrowed money to pay the fees, undressed for the medical exam in a recruitment center, read printed material about Germany provided by the Labor Office, and squeezed onto overcrowded trains on the route from Istanbul to Munich. The introduction describes a third chapter on liaison offices in Turkey (25) that apparently did not make it into the final manuscript, but which would have further bolstered the point that migration begins in the home country. In fact, the third chapter joins the workers as they arrive in Germany and settle into their employer-provided housing. Tightly regulated dormitories were one of the institutions that kept migrants bound to the category of "guest worker" as their "treatment outside work reinforced their positions in society" (80), but Miller shows how workers sought to carve out their own space and control their free time within this restrictive institution. In the second half of the book, Miller shows how "guest workers" were occasionally successful in transcending that status, arguing that many made long-term investments in West Germany well before the 1973 recruitment stop. In the fourth chapter, Miller uses Stasi files to follow a group of Turkish citizens—mostly men—who frequently crossed from West Berlin into East Berlin. While the chapter includes examples of men who worked as unofficial informants for the Stasi, the most striking finding is the number of long-lasting romantic relationships between Turkish men and East German women. Turkish men who experienced social exclusion in West Berlin could play the role of Western ambassador to East German women who saw them as desirable partners. This chapter highlights the ways in which the Wall could be surprisingly permeable while also complicating standard ideas about the xenophobic East and tolerant West. The final chapter offers a new perspective on the history of labor activism by examining the role of guest workers in both legal and illegal labor actions. Foreign women at the Pierburg auto parts factory in Neuss led illegal strikes repeatedly between 1970 and 1973 to protest the existence of "light-wage categories" that downgraded the [End Page 643] value of women's labor. Despite the union's failure to support their labor action, they ultimately won substantial concessions from management in August 1973. Despite their success, contemporary observers tended to forget that foreign women started the strikes...

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