The past decade has seen a much-needed surge in scholarship on European migration history. Among Germanists, the focus has largely been on Turkish immigrants, who first arrived in West Germany between 1961 and 1973 as formally recruited “guest workers” (Gastarbeiter) and who have constituted the country's largest and most contentious ethnic minority since the late 1970s. In this stylish and visually appealing book, Jennifer A. Miller provides a fresh take on the origins of the guest worker program, the state-organized train rides from Turkey to West Germany, guest workers’ lives in factory dormitories, their interactions with both West and East Germans, and their activism in West German labor movements. With keen attention to gender, sexuality, race, everyday life, and migrants’ agency, Miller makes an exciting contribution to the field of migration studies, infuses the story with complexity, nuance, and vibrancy, and ultimately does justice to the task of restoring agency to her subjects.

Miller's primary argument is that guest workers “had individual histories as they made new lives in Germany” (24) and they actively navigated—and, most importantly, crossed—the Othering boundaries of race, ethnicity, and nation. She supports this thesis with rigorous research and great finesse, artfully intertwining both German- and Turkish-language government documents, newspaper articles, and sociological studies with oral history interviews she conducted herself. The introduction situates Turkish guest workers in the “long post-war” (5) history of Germany, including physical and economic reconstruction, the Cold War, efforts to come to terms with the Nazi past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung), postcolonial and labor migration to Europe, and changing gender roles. Especially useful for nonspecialists is the section “Who Are ‘Turks’?” in which Miller grapples with the fraught nomenclature and the historical development of German discourses about Turks from the 1960s until today.

Belying the “in Germany” portion of the book's title, the first two chapters focus on guest workers’ experiences before they arrived in West Germany. Chapter 1 analyzes the complex application process at local recruitment offices in Turkey, which involved exhaustive paperwork and humiliating medical examinations. Furthering her argument about guest workers’ agency, Miller relays common strategies used to trick the system, such as bribing bureaucrats and doctors and purchasing clean urine. Chapter 2, about the government-organized train rides from Turkey to West Germany, innovatively addresses new trends in migration historiography that highlight the journey itself as a crucial component of migrants’ experiences. Here, Miller analyzes the failures of West German bureaucrats’ careful planning, which resulted in disorganized schedules, tense layovers in Cold War Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, and poor material conditions en route, including overcrowding and lack of water.

The experience of transit was crucial to the process of “becoming a guest worker” (58), as Turks who arrived in Germany “were not necessarily surprised by the substandard living conditions and work arrangements that awaited them” (76). Miller elaborates on these substandard living conditions in chapter 3, which explores guest workers’ experiences living in restrictive and poorly maintained employer-owned dormitories, whose German managers sought to police residents’ lives. This situation, Miller argues, was a “missed opportunity” (79) for integration. While “[m]oments of assimilation, integration, and social cohesion could have germinated in the daily close contact,” tense interactions between guest workers and housing managers “[drove] the two groups even further apart” (79). This missed opportunity reflected the West German government's broader refusal to invest in integration efforts during the 1960s due to the official stance that guest workers' stay was only temporary and that Germany was not an “immigration country” (Einwanderungsland).

The next two chapters emphasize “moments of subversion, radical change, and uncanny alliances” (168) in which guest workers—despite the rocky start—did manage to cross both literal and imagined borders. Chapter 4 is especially captivating as it reveals the untold story of guest workers’ many border crossings into East Berlin, whether for adventure, friendship, sex, or business ventures. Making deft use of untapped material from the Stasi archives, Miller argues that these border crossers “presented an interesting paradox” that “complicat[es] the divided city's story”: West Berliners “deemed them suspicious as foreign and ‘Eastern,’” while the Stasi “found them suspect because they not only came from West Berlin but also … embodied Western capitalist culture” (107). Many Turks even became Stasi informants (informelle Mitarbeiter) and spied on Turks in intimate relationships with East Germans.

Chapter 5 furthers the theme of cross-cultural interaction by exploring Turks’ activism in 1970s West German labor movements—a hitherto neglected topic. Highlighting several lesser-known local strikes, Miller argues that female workers in particular were able to form “imperfect solidarities” (135) across ethno-cultural lines and to stake a claim on their “newfound permanence” in West Germany “long before foreign populations dominated public political debates” (161). The conclusion takes the book up to the present day, noting the 1973 recruitment moratorium, family reunification policies, rising anti-Muslim xenophobia, the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks, and tensions surrounding Chancellor Angela Merkel's Willkommenskultur (welcoming culture) toward Syrian refugees.

Readers should be aware of two caveats related to the book's scope. First, as Miller confines her analysis to the guest workers themselves (the so-called “first generation”), those expecting to learn about the second-generation children of guest workers—who faced an entirely different set of experiences and discourses—should look elsewhere. The relative absence of the second generation is related to the second caveat: although the title spans the 1980s, the bulk of the book is about the formal recruitment years of the 1960s and early 1970s, before the 1973 moratorium on guest worker recruitment and the subsequent policy of family reunification. By no means are these caveats analytical flaws, but rather assets to the book. In fact, the clearly delineated scope helps provide a rich and variegated portrait of first-generation guest workers’ lives, without being overshadowed by the rising xenophobia and contentious debates surrounding the concepts of integration and multiculturalism that have plagued Germany since the 1980s. The overall impression, as Miller writes thought-provokingly on the book's penultimate page, is that “a different future was entirely possible” (178).