Female Turkish Immigrants Were Among the First to Germany

This past Monday, several hours before sitting down at the Sony Center in Potsdamer Platz to watch the U.S. get crushed by the Czech Republic, I met with Jennifer Miller, a fellow grad student studying Turkish immigrants in Berlin.  A couple years ago we took a course at Princeton together on religious fundamentalism in Turkey and later studied at the same Turkish summer language program in Istanbul, but it was only by coincidence that I learned Jennifer was in Berlin doing her dissertation research.

On Monday Jennifer took me and Pinar to visit a migrant social center in the heart of Kreuzberg that offers a variety of counseling services and social activities mostly for retired Turkish migrants.  We met one of the managers of the center, who kindly invited us on a trip the next day to a forest east of Berlin, and then took our tea out to the porch to hear more about Jennifer’s research and chat with some of the visitors to the center.

Jennifer’s project is a fascinating study of the experiences of the first Turkish migrants to Germany in the 1960s.  Over the past 9-10 months she’s been interviewing members of this population and tracking down primary documents in Germany and Turkey in order to flesh out the story as seen through the eyes of the migrants themselves.

One important fact that Jennifer clued me into was that single women were actively recruited to work in Germany.  Factories in Germany were especially eager to get women who had a background as seamstresses because their nimble fingers would be just right for assembling things like light bulbs and who knows what else.  Of course the demand for female labor is no news flash–take a look at any sweatshop footage or Google the word “maquiladoras”–but the general story I’ve learned about Turkish migration is that men were recruited from Anatolian villages to do manual labor and women arrived in the 1970s when men decided they’d be staying in Germany and wanted their families to join them.  I bet that is the basic story, but it’d be wise to brush up on the actual figures.

Pinar shared with us that her mom would tell stories about the girls who went to Germany from her town in eastern Turkey.  Although a young woman in small-town Turkey could face conservative social restrictions, especially back in the ’60s, those who somehow made it to Germany and came back were not just wealthier, but notoriously freer and more individualistic (yeah, yeah…I’m sure there’s some selection bias here).  What’s more, they became very marriageable, which is probably still true today.  Just last week Pinar saw part of a dating show on Turkish TV where all the guys were gaga over a 2nd generation Turkish-German woman.  The host even made a comment about it because the other women were, well, hotter.

Anyway, Jennifer’s research looks very promising and chatting with her served as a good reminder that it’s worth stopping every now and then to reexamine the stories we tell ourselves as we go about our research to make sure they check out with the facts.

Update:  The same goes for hastily uploaded blog posts.  Pinar tells me the program she saw was actually some kind of marriage reality show where the 2nd generation woman was the “prize” other men were competing for.  There weren’t other women on the show, but the host implied that it was the woman’s migrant status that was really attractive and not the fact that she was under 5′ tall.