Sixty years of Turkish “guest workers” in Germany

IT WAS NOTVW poverty or ambition that drew Irfan Demirbilek to Germany from Turkey in 1968, but the lure of its splendid cars. Spotting a queue outside an employment office in Istanbul one day, Mr Demirbilek, an electrician who had long dreamed of having his own wheels, decided to join them in applying to work in West Germany. The countries had signed a “guest-worker” deal in 1961, and a brief spell earning Deutschmarks would suffice for an Opel or Beetle. A few months later Mr Demirbilek was on a three-day train to Cologne, his head full of excitement and apprehension.As with so many Turkish guest workers, his brief German sojourn turned out to last a lifetime (and several cars, he chuckles). Now 84, he is sitting with his wife at a theatre in Düsseldorf, where the pair have just been garlanded with flowers in a ceremony to mark the 60th anniversary of the guest-worker treaty. The moment has offered Germany a chance to reflect on the complex history of what is now a 2.75m-strong Turkish minority, its largest by a distance.