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Rita Chin, The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)
Rita Chin's excellent book places the guest worker question at the center of Germany's postwar experience. It demonstrates how labor recruitment played an essential role in sustaining the economic miracle, shaped debates on democratization and gender equality, and informed struggles over the contours of German national identity. "Coming to terms with the labor recruitment" involved nothing less than "a decidedly national project with far reaching consequences that marked the Federal Republic in the Cold War period and continues to shape German culture and politics today" (265).
Chin approaches this ambitious task in a highly original manner, joining social scientists' focus on "policymaking, economics, and demographic changes" with literary critics' and cultural analysts' emphasis on "minority artistic expression and counternarratives" (13-14). According to Chin, policymaking and cultural production "need to be understood as constituent parts of an ongoing, continually shifting public dialogue" within which "debates over the guest worker question forced a major rethinking of the definitions of German identity and culture" (14).
Chapter One puts this strategy to good use, offering a useful summary of both the origins and workings of the Federal Republic's foreign labor recruitment program and early cultural productions concerned with the guest worker experience. With regard to policy, Chin correctly notes that migration elicited very little political debate from its inception in the late 1950s through its expansion in the early to mid 1960s. A combination of cross-class and cross-party consensus on the need for foreign labor recruitment was important in this regard, as was the belief that most guest workers would voluntarily opt to return to their home countries after satisfying the terms of their contracts. Perhaps more importantly, "[t]he heavy burden of guilt inherited by the Federal Republic for the genocide of the Holocaust . . . made West German leaders anxious to demonstrate a new sense of openness to non-Germans" (47). Hence, foreign laborers, such as the "one millionth guest worker," Armando Rodrigues de Sá, were cast as invaluable contributors to Germany's postwar economic miracle by government officials, employers, and journalists.
The further expansion of the guest worker program in the late 1960s and early 1970s and the propensity of growing numbers of migrants...