Today's Germany would be hard to imagine without them, and neither would it be Austria or Switzerland:the guest workers from southern Europe. We can still find traces of them everywhere today. Whether it's the kebab shop around the corner, the Jugo pub that I love so much, the Greek restaurant or the Italian ice cream parlor - they all go back to the heyday of guest workers in the 1960s and 1970s. Because no matter how absurd and unimaginable it may seem to us today:Up until then, Germany was still really German. There was no pasta Bolognese in this country, there was no pizza and there was nothing else that makes life worth living. Well... except maybe beer. Reason enough to take a closer look at the history of the guest workers!
When did the first guest workers come to Germany?
Of course, guest workers were not only found in Germany. They also played a major role in Austria and Switzerland and in other European countries such as Sweden in the middle of the last century. For our history, however, we only want to look at Germany today, or what was then West Germany. Much of what we will see there applies in a very similar way to other countries anyway. But hey, what happened back then? Why were guest workers brought to Germany? This has a lot to do with a development in the Federal Republic of Germany that would later be glorified, but is nevertheless enormously important for history:the so-called economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s. The German post-war economy began to record enormous growth about ten years after the end of the war, and by the end of the 1950s the country had achieved something that even the most dreamy politicians hardly dare to talk about today:full employment! Unemployment in Germany was less than one percent in 1960, but the economy continued to grow and it was not entirely clear where the workers needed for growth would be found.
To cut a long story short, the obvious solution was taken and guest workers were hired in other European countries. The story itself could end here, but you can probably already imagine it:this solution wasn't that obvious. A recruitment agreement with Italy had existed since 1955, and labor migration to Germany was not entirely unknown before, not to mention the forced laborers and “foreign workers” during the Second World War. Despite everything, the labor force required by the FRG did not come from the south until the early 1960s. It was refugees from the GDR who filled the posts. Only the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and the dwindling stream of East German refugees in connection with the peak of the economic boom brought about a turning point. Politicians, industry and trade unions were eventually able to agree:Germany should recruit more workers from Italy on the basis of the existing agreement. In addition, new agreements should be concluded with other countries. So the guest worker boom could begin.
And the land would never be the same
If you look at today's migration debate, you have to be surprised at first. So politics, industry and trade unions came to an agreement... Wasn't that not an issue at all in society back then? Were the Germans all hospitable and liberal contemporaries who were happy about their new neighbors and colleagues? Of course not! If the population had been asked, there would probably not have been a majority for the recruitment agreements of the 1960s. Germany was just not a particularly cosmopolitan country. Less than two decades earlier, the National Socialists had ruled here and society had not become much more colorful since then. That does not mean, however, that the guest workers who have now been invited met with widespread rejection. You just made arrangements. Even the critical majority wasn't as weepy back then as today's "We are the people" screamers.
Further development was rapid. In the course of the 1960s, the Federal Republic of Germany concluded recruitment agreements with Greece, Turkey, Spain, Portugal and Yugoslavia, as well as with other less well-known countries such as South Korea, Morocco and Tunisia. And the numbers were impressive. As early as 1964, the one millionth guest worker arrived in Germany, and millions more were to come. But the German state never had a real plan for these people. Of course, after they were recruited, they were distributed throughout Germany and mostly assigned to large industrial companies or used in the construction of public infrastructure. There was no explicit provision for integration in any of this. For the responsible Ministry of Labor it was all temporary and a rotation principle was to ensure that the guest workers left after a year and were replaced by new workers.
However, this system of rotation was not functional from the start. Employers soon expressed an interest in keeping “their” guest workers longer. The constant learning of new powers only used up capacities pointlessly. As a result, the workers also began to settle down a little more permanently. Originally only very few of them could imagine staying in Germany permanently. The living conditions of most guest workers remained minimal (to put it nicely) in order to save as much money as possible or transfer it to relatives. But many just got stuck. Months turned into years and in the end we all know it:once you get used to a place and a life, you often don't want to give it up so easily.
The end of an era. And the beginning of a new
But the general conditions changed at some point. The boom could not last forever and at the end of the 1960s economic growth in Germany slowed down for the first time and even tipped into a recession. But the big shock came in the early 1970s with the first oil crisis. Suddenly there were German unemployed again and the Ministry of Labor did what had always been the plan:it imposed a recruitment freeze for guest workers. On the one hand, the goal was also achieved. As a result, the number of new labor migrants fell rapidly, even though Italians, for example, now had new routes to Germany on the basis of their EC membership. However, it also became apparent that the idea of a time limit and the principle of rotation had failed miserably. To see that, just look at the numbers. How many guest workers had already come to Germany by the time recruitment was stopped? It was almost 14 million. How many were still here? Also several million. And now they had to ask themselves difficult questions.
In principle, the (now probably “former”) guest workers had two options. Either they returned to their home countries at the risk of not being able to return to Germany. Or they could stay and bring their families over, for which there were also legal options. The number of our Turkish, Greek, Italian and ex-Yugoslavian fellow citizens should tell you:Many have opted for the second option. The heyday of guest workers was over in the mid-1970s. But a whole new era began:Germany's era as a multicultural state. There is no way back to the country of the 1950s, when the average German didn't even know what pasta was. But honestly, who would want that?
This article was created as a result of a podcast conversation I had recently. There I spoke with my old college friend Arno about the Non-Aligned Movement and Yugoslavia during the Cold War, and we touched on the topic of Yugoslav migration to Germany. I couldn't just let that go 😉