German-Turkish Recruitment Agreement | Recruitment Agreement: Potato. I love you?

367,000 of the so-called guest workers stayed in Germany. To this day, many people still don’t feel really welcome. Photo: Pixabay »Potato. I love you!« These words are written on a memorial plaque at Munich Central Station. This is how Sümer Hanım is said to have replied when she got off after a 50-hour train journey from Istanbul to Munich and was asked whether she spoke German. The only German words that the then 30-year-old, a divorced seamstress and mother of two daughters, is said to have known.

Sümer Hanım was a so-called guest worker from Turkey. 65 years ago, on October 30, 1961, the Federal Republic of Germany and Turkey signed a recruitment agreement. Many Turks needed work. The German economy needed workers. Until the recruitment ban in 1973, around 867,000 so-called guest workers came to Germany from Turkey, of which around 500,000 returned.

According to the Federal Agency for Civic Education, in 2023 around 30 percent of the population had a migration background. “The Federal Republic is not a country of immigration,” however, was stated in the 1982 coalition agreement between the Union and the FDP. A sentence that can mean different things. In 2026, many may think that Germany must remain German. There are now too many foreigners. A narrative that ties in with the right-wing extremist conspiracy propaganda of the Great Exchange.

The journalist Nikolaus Blome wrote a column in “Spiegel” in 2023. The original title: “Germany is not a country of immigration”. Instead, Germany is “a country of refuge.” He described the sentence “Germany is a country of immigration” as a political penitential ritual that conservatives in particular regularly subjected themselves to.

Blome is correct in his analysis: Apart from flight, immigration obviously has economic motives. For the immigrants and for the country of immigration. This is not a purely capitalist phenomenon either. From 1963 onwards, the German Democratic Republic also signed recruitment agreements with other countries. Just with predominantly socialist states.

The SED initially condemned the FRG's "guest worker" policy and described it as a continuation of the Nazi regime's exploitation of foreign forced laborers. However, the SED later promoted its own recruitment policy, the “contract worker” policy, in the context of friendship and development aid. By 1990, more than 200,000 contract workers came to the GDR.

Both countries welcomed their foreign guests because their labor was seen and needed. One could say that the economic value of migrants was seen, not their human value.

There is also another interpretation of the sentence “Germany is not a country of immigration”. Some people, especially those with a migrant background, could sign this sentence without hesitation. Because they have the feeling that politicians and the majority of society have not yet understood that Germany is actually a country of immigration.

In 2017, the Bertelsmann Foundation published a paper with the title: “Culture of welcome in Germany – more than just a buzzword?” According to the criticism of the study, the term has remained unclear in the public debate. “A culture of welcome is more than just the demand for integration,” it says. Integration, if you want to stick with the controversial term, is a two-way street. The majority society also has a duty to encourage them to approach immigrants.

The Bertelsmann Foundation came to the conclusion: "Diversity is not actively shaped in the name of the population as a whole, but rather 'managed' in a solution-oriented manner where it occurs." That fits. Where the work of people is primarily taken care of, rather than the people themselves, management is carried out so as not to endanger capitalist peace.

In October 1985, the investigative journalist Günter Wallraff's book “Ganz Below” was published. Wallraff had posed as Ali, a Turkish guest worker. He worked in various jobs that Germans usually left to migrants.

Ali wiped tables at McDonald’s with a toilet rag. He played guinea pig for the pharmaceutical industry. As a temporary worker at Thyssen, he worked 16- to 24-hour shifts without a helmet or respiratory protection. Even without papers. The book sold more than five million copies in German and was translated into several languages.

Some may today criticize Wallraff's approach from a liberal identity politics perspective. But he showed the majority of society what they didn't see or didn't want to see: how a supposed immigration country treats its guests. In the end there was a wave of raids and lawsuits, some with millions in fines for corporations and service providers. Afterwards, McDonald’s even had works councils.

Around 500,000 of the Turks who immigrated through the recruitment agreement ultimately returned to Türkiye. 367,000 remained. They built a life in Germany, brought their family over or founded one. Created new jobs. For some in the Federal Republic of Germany, capitalism had fulfilled its promise of prosperity. However, not everyone feels really welcome, as various studies in recent years show. Germany should work on this.

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