Berkley Center

Here in Tübingen, Germany, I was lucky enough to receive a visit from my father and brother before the semester even started. We spent a long weekend in the Black Forest, where we stayed in a perfectly tiny, tidy, and cozy little German town called Bad Wildbad. The name is not actually as antipathetic as it sounds—the town is so called because of the thermal springs that supply numerous spa complexes with warm, fresh mineral water (Bad in German means "pool" or "bath"). While we were there, we had a great time enjoying how typically German everything seemed to us. As time went on, however, I realized that everything that we were experiencing was almost a bit too German.

In the little town of Bad Wildbad, I wouldn't have been surprised if we were the only non-ethnically German people there that weekend. As a tourist, one always seeks to get away from the other tourists in order to find the "real deal;" but what about the other non-ethnic Germans who can be found throughout the rest of Germany? Where were the Turks, the Russians, and all the other immigrants that have come to Germany in recent decades? I didn't know the answer exactly, but I could make a number of guesses.

Turks make up the largest immigrant group within Germany. Beginning in the 1960s, the Turks started coming to Germany in search of work, filling the huge labor gap that Germany was feeling at the time, and then returning home after a few years in the labor force... At least, that was the plan. Instead, many Turks simply stayed on in Germany after their time was up, and huge communities of Turks popped up in Berlin, Frankfurt, and other major German cities. By the end of the Guest Worker contracts in 1973, three million Gastarbeiter (guest workers) had remained in Germany and never went back to their homeland. As more and more Turks came to find work, the Turkish population of Germany grew and grew, until second- and third-generation Turkish immigrants started going to schools with their ethnically German classmates.

After all this time, one would think that the Turks of Germany would by now be well integrated into the German culture. In fact, there is some proof of this—the Turks make up such a huge part of Germany that they are now an accepted part of German life, and one can see marks of this in many other ways than the all-pervasive Döner kebab stands filling German stomachs with Mediterranean food. Although there aren't many Turks in Tübingen, a university town known for being on the posh side of things, my student mentor is Turkish, and I found it interesting that several courses I will be taking this semester from the center from the campus's Islamic Studies center are being cancelled this first week of classes in honor of the Muslim holiday Kurban Bayram (Eid al-Adha in Arabic). In a best-selling German novel that I'm reading, many (if not most) of the characters are Turkish, and Turkish words are thrown in almost as if the author expects the reader to understand them. Turks and Turkish seem to be everywhere in Germany—and yet, why were there no Turks enjoying the hot springs with us in Bad Wildbad?

Unfortunately, in spite of the abundance of Turks in Germany (or perhaps, because of it), as a whole, they remain the least integrated group of foreigners in all of Germany, according to a recent study. They came behind immigrants even from Yugoslavia and African countries; in some places in Germany such as Saarland, as many as 45 percent of Turks do not graduate from school. Ninety-three percent of Turks marry other Turks, and over 50 percent say that they feel unwelcome in Germany. Among Turks, unemployment is high, and many rely on state benefits as their only source of income.

Could this explain why there were no Turks enjoying the weekend at the thermal springs with us in this vacation town? I don’t pretend to know for sure, but whatever the cause, the absence of non-Germans in Bad Wildbad was definitely noticeable. As I begin to take Turkish classes this semester in Tübingen, and as I learn more and more about Turks in Germany, I hope I will better understand the isolation and separation between Turks and the rest of German society.