A question that could be from Günther Jauch: Who was actually the first to call Germany an immigration country? Petra Kelly? Jurgen Trittin? Or Franz-Josef Strauss, the founding father of the CSU? All wrong.
And when is the day that Germany became a country of immigration? Is it about today, Wednesday, because the federal cabinet for the first time decides on a points system for immigrants, like other, real immigration countries have had for a long time? Also not right.
We’re going to tell a little story about immigration here, which also includes a cute singer that all older people in Germany still know. And Udo Jürgens, who once again there is no way around, even if he is already dead.
The first top politician to speak of Germany as an immigration country was not a Green. When he put the word into his mouth, the Greens didn’t even exist. It was the Social Democrat Heinz Kühn, and that was a year before the Greens were founded. In his old age, the former Social Democratic Prime Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia had made a small career in federal politics.
Kühn, a cosmopolitan man, became a federal government’s first Commissioner for Foreigners. That was in November 1978. And a little later, in the new year, Kühn called Germany an immigration country. When Olaf Scholz tells this story in the Bundestag, you, dear readers, will know where he got it from.
Kühn was courageous back then. Because the Social Democrats, the top duo of Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt, hadn’t wanted anything to do with immigration for a few years. From the social democratic icon Schmidt, who only became famous after his term of office, there are still a few quotes about the ability of the largest immigrant group, the Turks, to integrate, which would end up on the index today.
Because in 1973 the WBII cabinet, the second government that Willy Brandt was able to form as Chancellor, announced the so-called “recruitment freeze”. Germany suffered from the oil crisis, and Greens get bright eyes today – they think of the car-free Sundays. What they don’t think about is that a Social Democrat whom they also admire today closed down Germany as head of government – he was afraid for the votes of the workers, who, hand in hand with the unions, feared cheap competition from Turkey, Italy and Greece.
History sometimes has its ironic sides, because Germany was not made a country of immigration by a red politician, let alone a green one, but by a deep black politician: Konrad Adenauer. Today, the CDU man is often portrayed as a jovial Rhinelander. He was socio-politically so conservative that in today’s CDU, at best, a marginal place would be reserved for him.
The day Germany became an immigration country was almost 67 years ago. On December 20, 1955, the federal government signed the first German contract for the recruitment of Italian workers – and because so many people from no later immigrant group became self-employed, this day is also the birth of a culinary turning point. “The Italian” saw the light of day. It has long since been Germanized, perhaps one can even say: “the Italian” around the corner, that is German dominant culture. Successful integration policy.
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We mentioned Franz Josef Strauss above, and he had his fingers in the pie with the Italy agreement – and his very own, not entirely kosher motives – today one would say: economic interests. He was concerned with keeping wages as low as possible in the slowly emerging Bavarian industrialization in the agricultural state of Bavaria. Italian migrants were supposed to help – and they did. Karl Marx, the first scientific anti-capitalist, would have spoken of a “reserve army”.
Ludwig “Wirtschaftswunder” Erhard was also in favor of targeted immigration, because in the post-war boom Germany was slowly running out of workers. At that time, however, no one called for foreign skilled workers, like the Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz, his Minister of Labor Hubertus Heil and the head of the employment agency Andrea Nahles today. But for manual workers for the hard and dirty trades, such as mining in the Ruhr area.
That is why the Ruhr area is still a German immigration country on a small scale – a role model for successful integration and failed integration. Ali and Alfred washed each other’s backs after the shift in the Kaue – on the one hand. On the other hand: backyard mosques, parallel justice and clans. In tranquil Mülheim an der Ruhr alone there are 16 properties that the local police call “clan houses”.
Labor migration was about a deal – good money for hard work. It wasn’t about one thing: integration. The recruitment agreement with Ankara, concluded in 1961, only provided for temporary work – the Turkish men from the rural provinces were to return home after two years. But what they didn’t do – the German industry didn’t want to let the hands-on guys, who caused no trouble and were punctual, move back to Anatolia.
This is not the only reason why it is also a myth that most of the “guest workers” – guests because they are in Germany for a limited period – stayed. They aren’t. Most of them went back to their old homeland, at least 12 of the 14 million recruited between 1955 and 1973, probably more.
Ironically, then the drastic cut, with which the immigration should be set to zero, had exactly the opposite effect, migration researchers like Aladin El Mafaalani can tell wonderful stories about it. The immigrant child from Datteln made it to a professor in Braunschweig.
After the Brandt government announced its recruitment freeze in 1973, the Italian, Greek and Turkish guest workers received a message that the federal government had not even considered, namely:
If we go back now, we can’t come back. So we bring women and children to Germany. And that’s how it happened – family reunification began on a broad front. What happened to the schools only a short time later: what to do with the many foreign children who couldn’t speak German?
Just this much: The Berliners decided in the mid-1970s to teach foreign and local children in joint classes. The Bavarians opted for separate classes, in their own German and foreign classes…
What does that have to do with Udo Jürgens? He is considered the first to address the other, the darker side of guest worker immigration for the guest workers themselves – that was in 1974 – and it was a highly political act:
“And then they told me about green hills, sea and wind,
Of old houses and young women who are alone;
And of the child who never saw his father.”
But “Greek Wine” was not the pioneering feat of guest worker songs. That happened twelve years earlier. And she didn’t come across as wine-loving and melancholy, but cheerful, maybe a bit naive. Cornelia Froboess, a blond star at the time, sang in 1962 when the first Germans were struggling over the Brenner Pass in their VW Beetle:
“A journey south
Is chic and fine for others
But two little Italians
Would like to be at home…”
With Tina and Marina in Napoli, because “they’ve been waiting for you for a long time”.
Tina and Marina then married locals in Napoli. Because people like Giorgio and Francesco decided to open a restaurant for luxury Italian cuisine in Kessenich at the German seat of government in Bonn. The “Sassella” run by the Tartero brothers became Helmut Kohl’s favorite pub.
It was here, in the wine cellar, that the stealthy “pizza” connection of blacks and greens was born. It could only be called that because CSU General Secretary Bernd Protzner, who invented the “pizza connection” to defame him, didn’t know that Giorgio and Francesco had a lot to eat, but none: pizza.
Incidentally, the first coalition agreement signed by the “Black Giant” included the sentence: “Germany is not a country of immigration.”
