_ "We asked for workers; we got people instead" _, wrote the Swiss writer Max Frisch in the foreword to the book "Siamo italiani - The Italians. Conversations With Italian Workers in Switzerland." The same happens when the first Turkish workers arrive in West Germany, undergo humiliating examinations and finally end up in factory halls where they are unable to communicate with anyone. One of them is called Metin Türköz. When he arrives in Munich in January 1962, he has his saz with him. Even though his stay is supposed to be a short one, bringing a piece of his own culture with him seemed only reasonable. A little later he finds himself in Cologne, where he works as a locksmith in the Ford factory, in the midst of a party whose attendants try to persuade him to sing for them. The mood is cheerful, but Türköz is not. As he begins to play, the words gush out of him. They are words about the promises and the disappointments of this life abroad, the life abroad in "Almanya, Almanya," as the song will later be called. It is a moment that is now considered to be the birth of what is often subsumed under the term "guest worker music," and that has a sixty-year history that ranges from Türköz to the anarchic disco-folk group Derdiyoklar İkilisi and rappers like Kool Savas or Mero. People had come to stay, and they brought music with them.
Kristoffer Cornils
Freier Journalist und Redakteur, Berlin
Feature
A Journey Into Turkish Music - Gastarbeiter*innen Musik (HHV.de Mag) / English
The document bearing the file number 505-83SZV-92.42 that was sent to the Foreign Office by the Turkish Embassy on the 30th of October, 1961, was barely two pages long and yet it was to forever change the direction of the history of the Federal Republic of Germany. With the so-called "Anwerbeabkommen," which was agreed upon by both sides on that day, the entry of workers who were supposed to participate in the German "Wirtschaftswunder," the Miracle on the Rhine, was regulated. These people were called "guest workers" and the term already revealed that they were not intended to stay for long: after two years, they should go back to Turkey so that others could replace them. The recruitment agreement between the FRG and Turkey was neither the first nor the last of its kind. Previously, similar agreements had been made with Italy, Greece, and Spain, after which contracts were signed with Morocco, South Korea, Portugal and Tunisia. And yet no other had such far-reaching consequences.