The historiography of the Turkish guest worker program and its subsequent political, economic, social, and cultural consequences is a rich and growing body of work, and Michelle Lynn Kahn’s Foreign in Two Homelands: Racism, Return Migration, and Turkish-German History contributes to it by examining the remigration of Turkish guest workers to Turkey not just as a mythical return, but also as a reality for many. Her book is not a history of immigrants constructing their own identities, but rather of outside forces forging identities of them and the consequences of those constructed identities. From the beginnings of the guest worker program in Turkey in the 1960s until the post-reunification era, Kahn draws on Turkish- and German-language sources to argue that, deemed too German by one “homeland” and not German enough by another, the experience of Turkish guest workers and their families was ultimately one of estrangement from both.

In Part I, “Separation Anxieties,” Kahn emphasizes the perspectives of those left behind in Turkey as well as their countrymen abroad. The first chapter, “Sex, Lies, and Abandoned Families,” uses the history of emotions to explore the growing anxieties those in Turkey felt for their absent family members, as well as Germans’ apprehensions about the foreigners in their midst. Here, Kahn lays critical groundwork for the rest of the study by identifying the emerging stereotype of the “Almancı” (which she defines as “Germanized Turk”) as a key symbol and articulation of the growing estrangement between Turks abroad and their families (and, eventually, their national community) back home. While West Germans worried that Turkish immigrants clung too tightly to their Turkishness to ever fully integrate, those back in Turkey feared that they were letting go of the values and beliefs that made them Turkish. Kahn offers multiple examples of the Almancı stereotype here, including in Turkish music and film, but there remain questions about how their creators both responded to and shaped popular perception of the Almancı and if popular culture also presented idealized versions of Turkish migrants that stood in contradistinction to the Almancı as the embodiment of growing estrangement (81–82).

In Chapter 2, “Vacations Across Cold War Europe,” Kahn follows Turkish guest workers as they travelled back and forth between West Germany and Turkey, drawing on both material culture and Cold War perceptions to demonstrate how both the travel and the vacations prompted Turkish migrants to identify with the Federal Republic and distanced them from their families back home. Among the Western goods Turkish migrants packed into their cars for the long drive were transistor radios, which Kahn highlights both as new technology that allowed migrants to maintain closer connection to their homeland and as an example of consumer goods that contributed to the Almancı label (121).

Kahn effectively demonstrates the political and economic elements of estrangement in Chapter 3, “Remittance Machines,” where she explores the conflict between West Germany’s plans to create economic development incentives in Turkey designed to lure migrants back, and the Turkish state’s resistance to those efforts. To the Turkish government, migrants were only valuable if they stayed abroad, sent remittances, and did not overwhelm the Turkish labor market. In addition to their frustration at being used as “remittance machines,” Turks in West Germany struggled with the challenge of Turkey’s compulsory military service. When the Turkish government offered “military service by payment” (163), the price to reduce the duration of service (which exceeded six months’ wages for most Turkish migrant workers) heightened their sense of exploitation and galvanized Turkish activism in West Germany to convince the Turkish government to lower the costs.

Even as Turkey was eager to keep its citizens in West Germany, the West German government and population were increasingly keen to start “Kicking Out the Turks,” Part II of Kahn’s book. Here, she examines “the nexus between return migration” and what she terms “West Germany's ‘racial reckoning’ of the 1980s” (30). She begins her exploration into this reckoning in Chapter 4 by examining the shift in German vocabulary around race to the use of Ausländerfeindlichkeit (xenophobia), “a more palatable term than Rassismus” (racism), as it “avoided the unsavory connection to Nazi eugenics and biological racism” (180). Through analysis of public discourse regarding the Turkish community and its potential remigration, Kahn identifies a continued strain of biological racism directly linked to the Nazi past. In the wake of Turkey’s 1980 military coup, the Turkish government was quick to highlight West German racism and use it as an offensive weapon to deflect European attacks on its own human rights violations.

The penultimate chapter, “The Mass Exodus,” perhaps most strongly reveals the necessity and effectiveness of Kahn’s transnational approach. Here, she investigates the development, implementation, and consequences of the Kohl administration’s 1983 remigration law that resulted in the remigration of some 15 percent of Germany’s Turkish population between November 1983 and September 1984 (229). Kahn weaves together the Kohl administration’s machinations, the participation of West German businesses, the Turkish state’s resistance, guest workers’ decision-making, and the reactions of Turkish media to demonstrate how the process on all levels was facilitated by and furthered the estrangement of Turkish migrants from both of their “homelands.”

While the final sections of the fifth chapter focus on the first generation and their return to Turkey, Chapter 6, “Unhappy in the Homeland,” centers on the children who accompanied them and provides the clearest picture of the challenge of re/integration while forwarding Kahn’s argument about German identity being shaped by debates within Turkey. As media coverage both in Turkey and West Germany highlighted the difficulties of the second generation in Turkish society, sympathy grew in the Federal Republic, particularly for students who, used to the more “‘democratic’ environment” fostered in West German schools, suffered in “authoritarian” Turkish classrooms (303). The second generation had become German enough, though the definition of that identity differed in Turkish and West German media, to warrant the attention and action of the Federal Republic, and the result was a new policy within the July 1990 revision of the Foreigner Law that allowed for a limited right of return and the possibility of naturalization. Kahn concludes her book with a reflection on the thirty years following reunification, touching on the increasing visibility of far right politics and violence in Germany, the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s volatile relationship with Europe more broadly, and the role of the Turkish diaspora in contemporary Turkish politics. This epilogue offers the reader a quick look at continuities and newer developments, such as the role of social media among Turkish remigrants and the further complication of what it means to be Almancı.

Foreign in Two Homelands is a complex interlacing of multiple histories: of West Germany and Turkey; of Cold War Europe and postwar migration; of governments, businesses, and schools. Running through all of these are the stories of individuals and families who left home and were never quite able to return. That Kahn doesn’t lose sight of the people most affected makes her book wonderfully engaging, even as she uses multiple categories of analysis to understand local, national, and international conflict surrounding a contested population. One of the strongest elements of Kahn’s analysis is this combination of a broad spectrum of factors with the sharp focus on the migrants’ sense of estrangement. While her subjects struggled to find belonging in either homeland, Kahn’s book should have no trouble finding its place as a critical contribution to the study of modern European and migration histories.