It was a memorable game: On Oct. 8, 2010, the national soccer teams of Germany and Turkey met in front of a full-capacity crowd of 75,000 at Berlin's Olympic Stadium. The fact that the fans who had flown in from Turkey, together with some of Berlin's sizable Turkish community, turned it into something of an away game for the German side wasn't the evening's biggest surprise, though. It was the name of the man of the match: Mesut ?zil. Initially greeted by deafening hisses, the unassuming 22-year-old forward, also of the Spanish ?ber-club Real Madrid, was the star of the night. His cool goal ten minutes from the final whistle, secured victory for his team: Germany.
Born to Turkish immigrant parents in Gelsenkirchen ? in Germany's former industrial heartland along the rivers Rhein and Ruhr ? Super-?zil, as some papers call him, is the first celebrity player of Turkish descent in a team that has been Germany's premier outlet for national pride ever since "die Mannschaft" first won the World Cup in 1954. ?zil is the most visible sign that something has changed recently in the story of Turkish immigration to Germany. And as German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday commemorate fifty years since the signing of the recruitment treaty that planted the seed of that community, Germany is forced to face the fact that the story has been, by and large, a rather sorry one. (See a brief history of the World Cup.)
?zil is something of a poster-boy for modern Germany ? or at least how the country likes to see itself today. After the player's virtuoso performance at the match against Turkey, Merkel was pictured congratulating a bare-chested ?zil in the changing room. The image was a fleeting distraction from the fact that a member of the far-right NPD party had earlier dismissed ?zil as a "plastic German" (a reference to the identity card carried by German nationals), and that the game had taken place against the background of a national debate about the hugely popular anti-immigration book Germany Abolishes Itself by Thilo Sarrazin, then a member of the board of Germany's Bundesbank. In a country of 81 million, the approximately three million Turkish nationals or Germans with Turkish roots make up Germany's largest minority ? and often attract the most resentment.
Signed on Oct. 30, 1961, the recruitment treaty allowed a booming German industry to bring in Turkish workers to give the labor force a much-needed boost. Contrary to popular belief, recent research has shown that the initiative for the treaty came from Turkey rather than Germany, which agreed, with a little prodding from the U.S., mostly for foreign policy reasons. In Istanbul on Sunday, dozens of those early migrants and their relatives boarded a special train to commemorate the original migrants' first three-day journey to Munich in 1961. "It wasn't easy for Germany to become Europe's strongest economy after the war. Our workers played a big part in that," said Cemil Cicek, head of the Turkish parliament, at the historic Sirkeci station. The workers were recruited by German labor officials from across Turkey, many from tiny villages. Hardly any of them spoke German nor anticipated staying on for longer than their contracts. Until there was a comprehensive stop announced in 1973, about 750,000 Turkish people, mostly men, went to work in Germany as "guest workers," as they were called until recently. (Now, Germans prefer to talk of those with "a migration background".) About half of them stayed. (See how Merkel walked a tightrope on German immigration .)
The Turks were relative late-comers, as Germany had earlier signed similar agreements with Italy (in 1955) and Greece (1960). But Turkish immigrants often did the dirtiest jobs while remaining invisible to society at large. It took the undercover journalist G?nter Wallraff, who exposed the exploitation of Turkish workers in the mid-1980s, to draw attention to their often precarious lives in Germany. Still today, Turkish immigrants and their descendants come last in terms of literacy, education, living standards, and employment.
There have been some recent improvements. In 2000, Germany changed its rigid citizen laws and made naturalization easier. Also, attitudes have started to change. The Greens, Germany's third-largest political party, is being led by Cem ?zdemir, who became the first law-maker of Turkish descent in Germany's parliament in 1994 and was elected joint chairperson of his party in 2008 (with his supporters chanting: "Yes We Cem!") In her latest weekly web-video message, Merkel praised the contribution of Turkish immigrants to Germany's economic success. "They have become part of our country," the Chancellor said. Indeed, there are entrepreneurs like Vural ?ger, whose Hamburg-based ?ger Tours touristic business was bought by Thomas Cook in 2010, prize-winning film directors like Fatih Akin (Against the Wall), actors like Mehmet Kurtulus, whose appearances as an undercover detective in the highly successful Tatort TV crime series were a hit with audiences and critics alike, and writers like Feridun Zaimoglu.
Overall, "Deutscht?rken" are more visible today, but there is still a long way to go before Turkish immigration to Germany can be considered a success story. After decades of closing their eyes to reality and insisting mantra-like that Germany was "no country of immigration," the country's leaders in the '90s declared themselves shocked by the existence of "parallel societies" in Germany, and began to demand that Turks integrate. (See pictures of immigration in Europe.)
And Turkey's recent rise on the global stage is mixing things up. With an annual growth rates of 9% last year, and a foreign policy that is turning gradually away from Europe and towards the Arab world, a self-confident Turkey changes the terms of the deal. Some leading Turkish politicians have warned Turkish immigrants and their descendants against assimilation, saying they should learn the Turkish language before learning German. Erdogan, speaking to German tabloid Bild on Wednesday, also criticized Germany for not acknowledging the Turkish contribution enough, quoting, amongst other facts, that 72,000 Turkish entrepreneurs in Germany had created 300,000 jobs. He also demanded stronger German support for Turkey's bid to join the E.U., an anathema to Merkel and her CDU party, which prefers to offer Turkey a "privileged partnership" instead. "It would give integration a boost," Erdogan argued with some justification. How it would change the face of the national soccer team, though, would remain to be seen.
? with reporting by Pelin Turgut / Istanbul
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