For decades now, Turks and other “foreigners” have had a ubiquitous presence in German society. And yet, these populations have rarely figured into narratives of postwar Germany as such or conceptions of German identity. Rita Chin, in her superb The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany, seeks to change all that. Labor migration, Chin contends, is central to the “most important and enduring question of the postwar period: how would West German national identity be reconstituted after the Third Reich?” (p. 7). As the “primary route to [a] more heterogeneous demographic and cultural landscape,” it also has great bearing on what Germany is today (p. 8). Chronicling the shifts in that landscape, Chin reveals a society becoming steadily multicultural, while struggling both to understand and to shape just what that means.

A great part of the book's success is methodological. Chin moves seamlessly between discussions of political economy and public policy, analyses of the discourse framing labor migration, and sophisticated readings of texts by Turkish authors and the responses of German media and cultural institutions to them. In addition, Chin deploys key analytic constructs with great nuance, carefully defining, for example, what she means by the German “public” and explaining how the marketplace both enabled and constrained the kinds of agency Turkish authors asserted. The book, in sum, is an example of interdisciplinary scholarship and conceptual rigor to which researchers of any subject may appeal for inspiration and guidance.

The content is equally impressive. Chin organizes her study around threshold moments drawn largely from the cultural realm: the arrival of West Germany's millionth guest worker in 1964, accompanied by great ceremony but little curiosity about the lives of such workers; the inauguration, with the publication in 1974 of Aras Ören's first installment of the Berlin Trilogie, of Gastarbeiterliteratur, predicated on growing recognition of immigrant struggles; the creation in 1985 of a literary prize for nonnative German-language writers, marking the partial inclusion of foreigners within models of German culture; and a 1999 exhibit on postwar Germany commemorating the millionth guest worker as a harbinger of the multi-ethnic society Germany became. These moments help to crystallize what Chin presents as the evolution within German discourse on guest workers from denial of their permanence, to the desire for their integration, to a shifting ideal of multiculturalism, impacted by employment crises, reunification, the xenophobic violence that followed, and the formation of the European Union. Skillfully interweaving cultural and political developments, Chin provides a remarkably synthetic and variegated narrative of postwar German identity—one focused on Germans' coming to terms not with the prejudices of the past but with the challenges posed by otherness and difference in the present.

Chin not only reconstructs but also dissects and evaluates public debates on guest workers. She is particularly adept at disclosing the condescension or even coercion that may lurk behind ostensible benevolence. Institutional efforts to confer legitimacy on nonnative authors, for example, often fetishized their ethnicity, narrowly casting them as mediators of cultural difference. Liberal concern for the plight of Turkish women, shackled by Islam and peasant patriarchy, served as a basis for both sensationalizing and denigrating the alleged backwardness of Turkish customs and implicitly demanding that Turks adapt to “enlightened” postwar German norms; lost in this gesture was an understanding of how the dislocations of migration themselves contributed to the marginalization of Turkish women. In general, Chin shows how easily ignorance, idealization, and self-righteousness compromised native German regard for immigrant populations.

The deployment of gender as a basis for asserting Germans' normative superiority gets at the crux of the multicultural dilemma that persists to this day. Most fundamentally, the multicultural ethos seeks to decouple a sense of nationality (and even citizenship) from ethnicity, raising the question of just what defines Germanness. Constitutional patriotism? The commitment to core, liberal values, such as tolerance, gender equality, and the freedom of religion and expression? Indeed, the book is most compelling when Chin identifies moments of conflict between two or more of these values. How tolerant should or must Germans be of religiously based forms of gender subordination or, as in the Rushdie affair, efforts to limit speech deemed heretical? And what constituency should be entitled to arbitrate such questions?

Throughout her study, Chin implicitly raises a final question: how specifically German is the German negotiation of its guest worker question? At times the German discourse on immigration seems conspicuously progressive, partly as an attempt to compensate for or overcome the prejudices of the past. At times, the discourse seems fiercely regressive, plausibly as a holdover of those prejudices. And just as often, the German dialogue about immigration seems rather like that of any liberal, western society grappling with issues of national identity in a globalized world. Gracefully balancing these moments, Chin provides another context for pondering whether and to what extent postwar Germany has achieved that great object of postwar longing—normalcy.