Germany of the 1970s Through the Eyes of a Child

I went back to the years between 1977 and 1979. For the effects of those two years on me have been deep enough to influence my life even today.

Our flight from Istanbul to Munich with Lufthansa in June 1977, and then our journey by train from Munich to the city of Regensburg, and a few months later our settling into the university campus, added to my life days that were beautiful, yet also bitter and filled with unsettling events and people.

In September of the same year, my schooling began in a Turkish class at an elementary school called Gerhardinger Schule. Everything was very different, and different as it was, it was also beautiful and enjoyable.

The gap in development and economic power between Turkey in 1977 and Germany in 1977 was enormous. It is still enormous today. As a six-year-old child, I was able to observe this chasm through the changing world of my toys. Remote-controlled cars, the car-racing track game called “Rennbahn,” and battery-powered trains mesmerized me.

My only problem in the first months was that I could not speak German, yet within a few months that problem had been solved. Everything was going well. However, especially with the beginning of school life and as I became more involved in social life, some problems began to emerge.

A few months after starting school, when we were told to take off our shoes in front of the classroom door and enter class only with another pair of shoes used solely at school, and when my feet grew cold under the pressure of the harsh winter, German discipline struck me in the face for the first time. When the shoes worn at school were forgotten at home, one entered the classroom in socks.

Over time, German children from other classes began to harass me and even got into fights that sometimes went as far as physically beating me.

At first I could not understand why, but when I realized what the slogan “Türken raus” meant, I began to understand how the world around me was looking at me.

With the courage that comes with childhood and the reflex of responding in kind to someone who behaved harshly toward me, I too responded to violence with violence and was forced to struggle constantly on my own with the situation I was in. None of the other Turkish children came to my aid.

During a festival in the central square of Regensburg (Dom Platz), I saw how Germans who had drunk liters of beer used the portable toilets set up in the square and how they turned the streets into almost a sewer pit. I told what I had seen to a German girl. She said that Turks were responsible for all that filth, and it drove me mad. I remember as if it were yesterday that I had a terrible fight with this red-haired girl.

Photo: Tunca Family archive.

On a very cold and snowy winter day, one of the female teachers at my school resisted allowing our Volkswagen car onto the school grounds. She told my father, who was trying to walk me from the schoolyard to the entrance of the building, that the vehicles used by Turks produced more carbon dioxide. Meanwhile, German families were driving their cars right up to that very door.

When we went out onto the street, Germans who at first approached my little brother Tuna, whom we pushed in a baby stroller, with very sympathetic attitudes would, upon realizing that we were Turkish, many times look at him and at us with disgust and move away from our side. This is one of the everyday scenes that remained etched in my memory.

The German society of the 1970s was a sick society. If we consider that about 35 years had passed since the end of World War II, then the generation that had participated in the war was around 55–60 years old. It held a significant population size and sphere of influence within society. The Germans that my family encountered every day in the streets and that I encountered every day at school were their children and grandchildren.

There was another side to this story. There was a Siemens factory in Regensburg. A significant portion of its workforce consisted of Turkish workers. They lived in a large apartment block of 100 flats called a “Heim” and associated only among themselves. Their integration into German society was almost nonexistent. The corridors of this building were filled with clothes hung on ropes strung across the apartment doors.

The streets of cities such as Adana, Urfa, Bitlis, and Sivas had virtually been transported into a single building in Regensburg. The Turkish workers living in this building worked continuously on night shifts. They spent the daytime sleeping. In other words, these people hardly ever saw the light of day. Both due to the culture they came from and because of their working hours, they had neither the intention nor the opportunity to integrate into German society.

There were many Turks who had come to Germany in the 1960s, who spoke no German at all, and who could only manage to do their shopping with the help of their school-going children. Most of the workers had come to Germany from Turkey’s eastern and southeastern regions. Without undergoing any change in their local cultures, they had been transferred into German society within an isolated social structure.

Within the same society, on one side were the Nazi officers of the 1940s, their children and grandchildren. On the other side were people who had set out from Adıyaman, Trabzon, Malatya, and Antep and had found themselves in the middle of Europe without ever having even seen Istanbul, Ankara, or Izmir. They were all trying to live together.

As a six-year-old child, I had no possibility of analyzing society from a sociological perspective. However, as our return to Turkey approached in June 1979 and the impatience of the excitement of returning grew, I remember constantly lamenting, “Why are we still not living in our own country anymore?” Of course, I had no way of foreseeing at the time that I would later regret this lament. But that was the spirit of those days.

Germany’s sick environment was beginning to wear me down. After all, I had also largely had my fill of new toys. We could return to Turkey. I was more than ready for it.

In June 1979, as we approached Kapıkule and saw the Turkish flag waving from afar, I remember with crystal clarity that we entered Turkey with tears streaming from my mother’s and father’s eyes out of longing for the homeland. I had no tears, but a great dream had turned into reality.

A newspaper in Regensburg (Mittelbayerische Zeitung) had come to our classroom to conduct a piece of research on Turkish children living in Germany, to be published on June 30, 1979. They spoke with me at great length and took many photographs of me. When they asked whether I missed Turkey, under the influence of the unpleasant events I had experienced up until that day, and with the added effect of being told that my photograph would appear in the newspaper, I poured out all my anger on the journalists.

I said in the interview that I wanted to return to Turkey, that I did not want to live in Germany, and that I wanted to go to my grandmother, my other grandmother, and my grandfathers. I still remember that the woman who conducted the interview kept laughing continuously as I spoke. One important reason she took a special interest in me was that I was the only Turkish student who said, “One day I will leave Germany.”

Photo: Tunca Family archive.

There were many examples of children from families who had gone to Germany to work and earn money. However, there were very few examples of a child from a family that had gone to a university campus with an Alexander von Humboldt scholarship. For this reason, they looked at me as if I were a laboratory guinea pig and tried to examine and understand what I said. Since our family’s contact with other Turks was limited due to my father’s job, my German proficiency was at a more advanced level than that of the other children.

We were living on the university campus. My first foreign friend in my life was Johnny, who was of mixed Ghanaian and Polish background. I learned many things from this friendship. With my back-pedal bicycle, which was a gift from my grandfather and had been purchased for 100 German Marks, we roamed around freely in the after-school hours. Even a small child could ride around comfortably everywhere on a bicycle.

Although we were living under much more privileged conditions than other Turks, the general social structure we were in was still not very pleasant. Nevertheless, a pleasant couple of years and an experience whose contributions I would understand later had offered me a wide window of perspective through living in Germany. I arrived at this judgment when I evaluated what I had lived through years later.

Yes, we had returned to Turkey, but the return also brought with it a different kind of painful process. In the third grade that I started at İskenderpaşa Primary School in Istanbul’s Fatih district, it took me an entire year to understand why, despite decorating the fraction lines with all my good intentions and careful coloring—thinking they were ornaments—I could not please anyone. I went to school crying every day. Why had we returned from Germany? I regretted deeply what I had thought and felt in Regensburg.

Life in Germany had not been easy, but life in Turkey was not easy either. I had never imagined that I would feel like a stranger in my own country. My grades were terrible. I could not adapt to the new order. I was a stranger in my own country as well. This feeling struck my heart like a slap. Being in between, belonging nowhere, and being unable to truly embrace any place was a terrible feeling.

One day I was speaking with Karen Krueger, who was the editor of the culture and travel pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. She said that from time to time she produced cultural content on Turks living in Germany. Thereupon, I told her my own experience at length. I also explained that although I belonged to a minority group in the world of the 1970s, I had rights protected by law and the right to be educated in my own mother tongue. But I also spoke about how the everyday attitudes of both German and Turkish societies toward one another had made integration impossible. Moreover, I also mentioned that as a Turk who, again due to my father’s work, had had the chance to enter the German presidential palace and speak with President Walter Scheel, I had nevertheless experienced great hardship.

In the end, we spoke about how laws contain measures to prevent primitive people from acting primitively, but how the way societies approach one another and their attitudes are the real determinants of social order.

Those two years taught me two things at the same time. I learned that cultural identity is shaped not only by belonging but also by exclusion. I also felt throughout my life how cultural richness can become a burden in inward-looking societies like Turkey.

A significant portion of the workers who came to Germany could not adapt to society. Adaptation was left to the next generations. What was demanded of them was not adaptation, but labor.

As for me, within that structure I remained in a place that was neither fully inside nor fully outside. I learned how to look, how to compare, how to take distance, and how to recognize difference. Many of the roots of what determines how I look at the world today were planted back in those years without my being aware of it.

Years later, when I read Max Frisch’s words, “We wanted workers, but we got people/Wir riefen Arbeitskräfte, und es kamen Menschen," I understood how everything I had lived through could be told so simply in a single sentence.

How these personal experiences left their mark on my later years deserves another, much longer piece of writing.