McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020
What happens when migrants are rejected by the host society that first invited them? How do they return to a homeland that considers them outsiders? Foreign in Two Homelands explores the transnational history of Turkish migrants, Germany's largest ethnic minority, who arrived as 'guest-workers' (Gastarbeiter) between 1961 and 1973. By the 1980s, amid rising racism, neo-Nazis and ordinary Germans blamed Turks for unemployment, criticized their Muslim faith, and argued they could never integrate. In 1983, policymakers enacted a controversial law: paying Turks to leave. Thus commenced one of modern Europe's largest and fastest waves of remigration: within one year, 15% of the migrants—250,000 men, women, and children—returned to Turkey. Their homeland, however, ostracized them as culturally estranged 'Germanized Turks' (Almancı). Through archival research and oral history interviews in both countries and languages, Michelle Lynn Kahn highlights migrants' personal stories and reveals how many felt foreign in two homelands.
Dr. Michelle Lynn Kahn is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Richmond. She is a scholar of the global and transnational history of Germany after 1945, with thematic expertise in far-right extremism, migration, and racism. Her first book, Her first book, Foreign in Two Homelands: Racism, Return Migration, and Turkish-German History (Cambridge University Press, 2024), explores the transnational history of Turkish migrants in Germany. Dr. Kahn currently researches the transnational far right and is writing a book about German and American neo-Nazis.