Guest workers. In Germany that's what they call any foreigner who lives and works in the country and not gone through the tortuous process of obtaining citizenship. In reality it applies mainly to the thousands upon thousands of Turkish nationals who reside within borders of the country doing those jobs all Western countries assign their poor immigrant populations. In the fifty-odd years of the post-World War II era, during the rebuilding, the economic miracle, and finally reunification when the Wall came down, they were an accepted part of life in Germany.
However, as of September 12th, 2001, they all became potential terrorists, or at the least threats to security. Families who had lived in Germany for three generations were just as suspect as the new arrivals off the plane from Istanbul. It suddenly became important which Mosque you attended, if you were a man whether you shaved or not, or as a woman if you wore the head scarf or not. After years of looking over the Wall waiting to catch Russian spies, German intelligence now refocused on the enemy within. How many of these once innocent Muslim youth societies were now secretly preparing their young members as terrorists to be launched against the West.
Of course Germany is also sensitive to criticism about impinging on the human rights of any minority as a result of the Holocaust. However, that doesn't prevent families who have been living and working in Germany for two generations coming under suspicion and being subject to threats and coercion. If you go to your daughter's wedding in Istanbul maybe we won't let you back in if you don't co-operate, or maybe we will whisper a word in someone's ear in Turkish intelligence so you will cool your heels in prison for suspected acts of terrorism.
Welcome to Germany in the twenty-first century as depicted by John Le Carre in A Most Wanted Man, being released on October 2, 2008 by Penguin Canada. It's a country as dominated by paranoia, rumour, and heresy as the United States, at least among those who claim responsibility for protecting its citizens from the dangers of a big bad world. When it was revealed that three of those involved with the September 11th attacks were from Hamburg, their focus turned on the enemy within.
Article comments
1 - Fred
As a long-time fan of Le Carré, "A Most Wanted Man" was a looked-forward to reading. In general it lived up to expectation, although Le Carré's cynicism is a little too obvious, and his "Intelligence" characters largely caricatures. One annoyance of the edition I read was that it was published in the US (a large print edition by Center Point) and translated, for some odd reason, into US English. No big deal, except that one of the British intelligence operatives has a business card with US spellings (an unlikely scenario from the very British Le Carré ).