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From the beginning, German policy seemed almost hard-wired to produce a failed arrival city, one whose residents can neither establish themselves in a meaningful way nor realistically expect to move permanently back to their villages. This exclusion began in 1961, when the German economy was booming, creating large-scale labor shortages; the erection of the Berlin Wall had severely curtailed the supply of workers from within Germany and eastern Europe. That year, the Federal Republic of Germany set up a recruitment office in Istanbul to hire labor for the Telefunken transistor factory, in Berlin, and the automotive plants of the Rhineland. The workers, under the 1961 Recruitment Agreement for Labor, would initially be known as Fremdarbeiter (alien workers) and then, in a better reflection of the policy’s goals, as Gastarbeiter (guest workers). About 10,000 came in the first year, arriving at a special segregated rail terminal in Munich and housed on factory sites by their employers, who were expected to provide return tickets.

The Turkish “guests” were meant to be employed for a short but indefinite period and then return. This was a popular view among both Germans and the Turkish men themselves, a majority of whom intended to move back within four to six years, ideally to buy some property or start a shop or a small business.20 But employers needed to teach the workers specialized skills and basic German language, which took months, and they discovered that workers isolated from their families were less productive, so, within a few years, employers were attempting to bypass the system and settle the workers. At the same time, many of the Turkish men discovered, as arrival-city pioneers so often do, that returning was not so easy. Their villages had become dependent on their remittances, they had developed personal relationships in Germany, and they had become the social and economic enablers for future waves of men from their villages.

In 1974, Germany abandoned the guest-worker system and officially ended all immigration. At that point, 910,500 Turks were living in Germany. About half the Gastarbeiter had returned to Turkey, and the rest had formed complex lives in the nascent arrival cities. They were not encouraged to become part of German society; indeed, the government did nothing to aid their transition to urban or European life, since they did not officially exist.

By not having any immigration policy at all, Germany virtually guaranteed that all of its immigrants would be family-reunification migrants, and thus mainly villagers. Over the next 30 years of “non-immigration,” more than a million more Turks would legally enter the country, a great many of them from even more rural, more conservative, and more deprived backgrounds than the original guest workers. Most of them would occupy the handful of urban neighborhoods where they could obtain housing. By 2002, there were 2.6 million Turkish citizens living in Germany, yet only 30 percent of them had immigrated as workers. More than half were spouses and children brought over by those workers, and fully 17 percent—more than 440,000 people—were the German-born children of those families, who had never seen Turkey, except perhaps on brief trips, but were denied citizenship in Germany.

What happens to people when they are pushed into an irreversible rural–urban transition in a country that does not allow them to exist as citizens? The economic and material effects can be seen on the streets of Kreuzberg. On its bohemian, ethnic-German edges, it is teeming with shops and cafés, driven by an architectural layout that seems ideal for the best forms of urban life. In its Turkish core, though, those same streets are strangely barren, devoid of activity—a forlorn kebab shop here, a charity storefront there, a distinctly un-Teutonic amount of garbage on the street. Because so few Turks are allowed citizenship, they are prevented from forming businesses by German laws,