Ludwig Erhard was a severely injured WW I veteran. I present data on his vita. Erhard’s education ended with a doctorate at the University of Frankfurt/Main with Franz Oppenheimer, the “liberal socialist,” in 1925. After some unsuccessful years in his father’s textile business at his hometown Fürth, he was employed by the Institute for Economic Observation of German Manufactured Goods in 1929 in Nuremberg. In 1943, Erhard founded his own Institute for Industrial Research. I provide evidence that he had twice shown political turncoat behavior: from a liberal in the European sense during the Weimar Republic to Nazi economic-policy doctrines until German military defeat in 1943 became a foregone conclusion, and thereafter to the American conception of market instead of government-controlled economic conditions. I discuss Erhard’s qualifications for public office as well as the strengths and weaknesses of Erhard’s character.

For the thousands of children and teenagers who returned to Turkey with their parents during the mass exodus of 1984, the very concept of “return” was fraught. For many children, leaving West Germany in the 1980s was not a return or a remigration, but rather an immigration to a new country as emigrants from West Germany. The struggle of these archetypical “return children” was especially pronounced because they bore the burden of another label: “Almancı children,” or “Germanized children.” These children had particular difficulties reintegrating into the Turkish school system, and both the Turkish and West German media regularly emphasized the “liberal,” “democratic” education in Germany in contrast to an allegedly “authoritarian” education in Turkey. Although West German policymakers were initially relieved to export the burden of integrating these children to Turkey, they soon developed sympathy. Though twisted in the service of racism, this sympathy for the children’s plight compelled a rare relaxation of West German immigration policy. In 1989, just five years after kicking them out, Kohl’s government permitted the children to return once again – this time, not to their parents’ homeland but to the one that many considered their own: Germany.

The book begins in the Turkish beach town of Şarköy, home to a community of first- and second-generation return migrants who were interviewed for this book. These returnees are just some of the millions of people who have journeyed back and forth between Turkey and Germany for over 60 years. The introduction lays out the book’s four core arguments, which together reveal that Turkish-German migration history is far more dynamic than typically told. First, return migration was not an illusion or unrealized dream but rather a core component of all migrants’ lives, and migration was not a one-directional event but rather a transnational process of reciprocal exchange that fundamentally reshaped both countries’ politics, societies, economies, and cultures. Second, migration introduced new ambivalence into European identities: although Germans assailed Turks’ alleged inability to integrate, they had integrated enough to be criticized in Turkey as “Germanized Turks” (Almancı). Third, examining West German efforts to “kick out” the Turks in the 1980s exposes the reality of racism in the liberal, democratic Federal Republic of Germany. Finally, including Muslims and Turks in European history expands our idea of what “Europe” is and who “Europeans” are.

Challenging the myth of non-return, this chapter shows that, by the 1970s, many guest workers did want to return to Turkey. But instead of support, they encountered opposition from the Turkish government. In the 1970s, the link between return migration and financial investments dominated bilateral discussions between Turkey and West Germany. After the Oil Crisis, West Germany devised bilateral policies to promote remigration. Turkey, then mired in unemployment, hyperinflation, and debt, actively resisted those efforts. The Turkish government realized that guest workers played a significant role in mitigating the country’s economic crisis. To repay its foreign debt, Turkey needed guest workers’ remittance payments in high-performing Deutschmarks. If guest workers returned to Turkey, then that stream would dry up. Turkish officials thus strove to prevent mass return migration at all costs – even when it contradicted guest workers’ interests. These tensions also manifested in Turkey’s charging of exorbitant fees for citizens abroad who sought exemptions from mandatory military service, prompting young migrants to create an activist organization that critiqued this policy. The knowledge that they were unwanted in both countries widened the rift between the migrants and their home country, which disparaged them as “Germanized” yet relied on them as “remittance machines.”

This epilogue reexamines select themes – return migration and transnational lives, estrangement from “home,” racism, and the inclusion of Turks in European society – applying the arguments put forth in the previous chapters to more recent developments. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and German reunification in 1990, there was an explosion of racist violence that recalled the racism of the 1980s and reverberated throughout Germany and Turkey. The 1983 remigration law had its own echoes in a 1990 GDR law that incentivized the departure of unemployed foreign contract workers. In the new millennium, paying unwanted foreigners to leave became standard practice for dealing with asylum seekers – in Germany and a united Europe. Over time, Germans transposed the call “Turks out!” onto a new Muslim enemy: Syrian asylum seekers. For its part, Turkey’s turn to authoritarianism under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has strained Turkey’s relations with Germany and the diaspora. These developments come with profound implications – regarding citizenship, political participation, and national identity – for the approximately 3 million Turks who live in Germany today, and for the hundreds of thousands who have returned.

When Helmut Kohl became chancellor in October 1982, he resolved to fulfill the CDU’s promise of turning a remigration law into reality. But given the potential backlash at home and abroad, he knew that achieving his goal – getting rid of half of the Turkish migrant population – would be difficult. How, after perpetrating the Holocaust forty years prior, could West Germans kick out the Turks without compromising their post-fascist values of liberalism and democracy? How could they do so while minimizing criticism from the Turkish government? The answer, codified in the 1983 Law for the Promotion of the Voluntary Return of Foreigners (Rückkehrförderungsgesetz), was to pay Turks to leave. The West German government offered unemployed former guest workers a “remigration premium” to take their families and leave by September 30, 1984, with no option to return. While the remigration law fell short of Kohl’s 50 percent goal, it sparked one of the largest mass remigrations in modern European history. Between November 1983 and September 1984, 15 percent of the Turkish migrant population – 250,000 people – returned to Turkey. Nearly half of those return migrants came to regret their decision, as they encountered difficulties “reintegrating” both socially and economically into their own homeland.

A comprehensive assessment of the Fragebogen is presented in the book’s conclusion, including speculation about the enduring effects of denazification on the two German successor states. The unexpected achievements of the zonal screening programs are measured against their many weaknesses and negative results. Consideration is also given to more recent ideological screening projects in different parts of the world, and the historical lessons ascribed to denazification. The book ultimately concludes that despite the many inherent and acquired problems of the Fragebogen screening program, it is difficult to imagine a denazification process that would have been more effective in achieving both the removal of Nazism as a practical political force and the transformation of the beliefs of individual Germans.

The book’s introduction explains why the years 1963 to 1975 were a period of tremendous experimentation in German foreign relations. A succession of relatively weak chancellors gave scope for cabinet members to push in various directions, whether this involved voracious weapons procurement, a single-minded battle against inflation, more generous development aid, or a tighter commitment to European integration. Even in periods of political instability, developments in West Germany had great import for Europe and the world beyond. Historiographically, the introduction stresses the broader historical relevance of German foreign relations: its study reveals the contested values of postwar Germans and how those priorities came to shape the international environment. Methodologically, the chapter presents a brief discussion of constructivism as outlined by political scientists Alexander Wendt and Susan Strange. International relations theory informs the book’s core question – how West Germans shaped and were shaped by the international system.

In western Germany, a major controversy developed over the British and French policy of requiring German courts to prosecute Nazi crimes against humanity. German critics argued that this violated the violation on ex post facto law making. This, they said, made such trials unjust and similar to the courts of the Third Reich, which had also used ex post facto laws. The British and their German supporters argued that Nazi crimes could only adequately be punished as crimes against humanity, since many Nazi misdeeds had not been criminal under the laws of the Third Reich (e.g. the denunciation of individuals to the Gestapo). The American decision not to grant German courts jurisdiction over crimes against humanity came in large part out of a desire to avoid a similar controversy in their own occupation zone. Many of those critical of prosecuting Nazi atrocities as crimes against humanity wanted to help Nazi criminals and make it harder to prosecute Nazi crimes. Yet, because they made their arguments in the language of liberal legalism and the principles of legality, these critics helped to deradicalize the German legal profession, which had previously been deeply anti-liberal and anti-democratic.