West side stories : the Greek Gastarbeiter’s migration to the Federal Republic of Germany and their return to the homeland (1960-1989)

Abstract

This doctoral thesis is a social history of the Greek migrant workers in West Germany, with an emphasis on the role of the sending country in all the stages of their migration journey. It examines the different ways the Greek migrants’ transnational bonds were formed, expressed and preserved in their daily life in West Germany in the period 1960-1989. Heated debates about the desirability of emigration and return, confrontations and divisions in the realms of the Greek migrant community in West Germany, manipulation efforts and failed initiatives of the sending state are at the centre of my investigation. Starting from the postwar reconstruction period, I set the background of the political and social transformations in Greece and West Germany, which made up the push and pull factors of the Gastarbeiter system. In the three Cold War decades, the Greek Gastarbeiter were present in West Germany and continuities and ruptures in policymaking and social attitudes determined their fate. In a nutshell, this research project seeks to answer the following questions: who were the Greek Gastarbeiter? What did the Greek state do for them? How was their agency expressed? The Greek Gastarbeiter might have been “birds of passage”, but their imprint in the evolving realities of postwar Greece was indelible.