Idil Morsallioglu

Fifty-eight

The word “guest” implies that a person is invited and welcomed by the host. 

It also means that the person will only stay for a limited amount of time. What is a “guest-worker” (“Gastarbeiter”) – a “guest” that is supposed to work? No, it’s a euphemism to recover from the euphemisms of the past, when “foreign-workers” (“Fremdarbeiter”) had been, in fact, slaves. 

In 1961, 16 years after the end of Nationalsocialism, Germany signed a contract with the government of Turkey to recruit Turkish workers to compensate the German labor deficit. At first, they were only allowed to stay up to two years, to remind them and the country of the fact that they should not become part of society. However, the situation changed quickly due to outrageous expenses of recruiting new “guests” biennially.  With the continuous influx of workers until the recruitment ban 1973, and later the family reunifications, the “Turkish” population in Germany is now, 58 years from 1961, the second largest in the world after Turkey.

Postcards with quotes from the German residency law and photographs by Idil Morsallioglu, 2019