Immigration, Integration, and Anxiety in Germany

Ostow’s review essay addresses two recent books by the scholars Ruth Mandel and Joyce Marie Mushaben that deal with Turkish migration and partial integration in Germany. She outlines how the lenses of these authors’ respective disciplines—political science and cultural anthropology—shape their different but potentially complementary understanding of Turkish guest-workers and their families and descendants, and how the analysis of the politics and culture surrounding their arrival and eventual settlement in Germany must be situated in the context of the larger waves of flight, resettlement, and labor recruitment that have brought 20 million newcomers who have stayed on in Germany since the end of World War II. She argues that Germany became a country housing diasporas while lacking a properly nuanced set of admission, citizenship, and cultural absorption policies. She praises and details the advantages both of Mushaben’s approach, which compares the experience of quite diverse immigrants (Italian, Polish, and German in addition to Turkish), and Mandel’s, which deals with smaller histories and interfaces—“spaces of interaction”—where German and Turkish and sometimes other cultures meet.