The introduction to Rita Chin’s book on guest workers in postwar-Germany focusses on the face, role and importance of guest workers in shaping the nation after the fall of the Third Reich. The wider argument highlights how the debate about the place of guest workers in Germany “forced a major rethinking of the definitions of German identity and culture. What began as a policy initiative to fuel the economic miracle eventually became a much broader discussion about the parameters of a distinctly German brand of multiculturalism” [p.14].
Between 1945 and 1990, Western Europe experienced three broad types of population movements: “guest worker migration, postcolonial migration, and the migration of asylum seekers and refugees.” [p.24]. Chin commences the article with the example of Armando Rodrigues – a Portugese worker who, like many others, left his family in 1964 to find work in Germany. What was different about Rodrigues was that he became the one-millionth guest worker in the Federal Republic, and was thus bestowed with a motorcycle and a bouquet of carnations when he arrived at the train station, captured in an iconic photograph for the media. This was a public acknowledgement by Germany of its dependence on migrant workers for industrial development, [p.3] and Rodrigues became the “labour migration’s first national icon” [p.6]. The motorcycle symbolically signified the importance of industry and the increasing availability of material luxury goods that, in theory, could be acquired by each newly arrived labourer if they worked hard [p.5]. There was no evidence, however, of the hard work involved, or the pain of having to leave families behind, for the workers in the photo – only the possibility of success and reward was stressed. Chin phrases it as follows: “The media event at the train station offered a highly circumscribed view of the guest worker in question. And the photograph itself reinforced the ideological frame constructed by German officials, quite literally cutting off Rodrigue’s past and future” [p.3].
The transnational aspect of Rodrigues was that he finally became a face of the mass of migrant workers. He personalised the movement and provoked questions about where he came from, and why. However, the influx of migrant workers resulted in a sizeable group of taxpaying individuals who were not granted political rights, nor citizenship. In fact, citizenship laws were not revised until 2000 to grant citizenship to migrant labourers and their descendants [p.23]. This is part of the story never told – the bits that were cut out of the picture frame just like in the newspaper photo of Rodrigues in 1964.
Chin stresses the problematic consequences for nations like Germany and Switzerland that imported large numbers of workers as a quick solution for labour shortages. With time, temporary labourers desired to become permanent workers in their new homes, making it difficult to turn them away. As a result, these previously homogenous nations became unintentionally international [p.25].
Moreover, the patterns and solutions for guest workers differed across various nations. Germany is a very different case study compared to, for example Scandinavia and Britain. In Sweden, travelling workers were seen as potential permanent immigrants and even encouraged to settle [p. 25]. Germany demonstrates the difficulty of generalizing about the position of minority groups in different countries. Thus a more open approach to different patterns of guest worker arrival and reception is also more appropriate for its study. This is not a topic of simply demographic change – in this context it ultimately concerns the development of a specifically German multiculturalism [p.29]. Migration is “a defining feature of the New Europe, the driving force behind the development of more ethnically diverse cultures and societies” [p.24]. Thus it needs to be studied, and to be studied across borders – the very definition of transnational history.
Rita Chin, Introduction: Conceptualizing the ‘Guest Worker’ Question, The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany, (New York, 2007).