For the thousands of children and teenagers who returned to Turkey with their parents during the mass exodus of 1984, the very concept of “return” was fraught. For many children, leaving West Germany in the 1980s was not a return or a remigration, but rather an immigration to a new country as emigrants from West Germany. The struggle of these archetypical “return children” was especially pronounced because they bore the burden of another label: “Almancı children,” or “Germanized children.” These children had particular difficulties reintegrating into the Turkish school system, and both the Turkish and West German media regularly emphasized the “liberal,” “democratic” education in Germany in contrast to an allegedly “authoritarian” education in Turkey. Although West German policymakers were initially relieved to export the burden of integrating these children to Turkey, they soon developed sympathy. Though twisted in the service of racism, this sympathy for the children’s plight compelled a rare relaxation of West German immigration policy. In 1989, just five years after kicking them out, Kohl’s government permitted the children to return once again – this time, not to their parents’ homeland but to the one that many considered their own: Germany.

This chapter addresses the nexus between racism and return migration in the early 1980s, which marked the peak of anti-Turkish racism. As the call “Turks out!” (Türken raus!) grew louder, policymakers debated passing a law that would, in critics’ view, “kick out” the Turks and violate their human rights. During this “racial reckoning,” West Germans, Turkish migrants, and observers in Turkey grappled with the nature of racism itself. Although West Germans silenced the language of “race” (Rasse) and “racism” (Rassismus) after Hitler, there was an explosion of public discourse about those terms. Ordinary Germans, moreover, wrote to their president expressing their concerns about migration, revealing both biological and cultural racism. The simultaneous rise in Holocaust memory culture (Erinnerungskultur) is crucial for understanding this racial reckoning. While many Germans warned against the mistreatment of Turks as an unseemly continuity to Nazism, the emphasis on the singularity of the Holocaust offered Germans a way to dismiss anti-Turkish sentiment. Turkish migrants fought against this structural and everyday racism with various methods of activism. Turks at home, including the government and media following the 1980 military coup, viewed these debates with self-interest, lambasting German racism in the context of the 1983 remigration law.

This chapter explains how Egypt became a state with a high level of crony capitalism, and also why the Arab Uprisings failed to change the status quo despite throwing out the prior regime. The rise of the Egyptian military, and in particular its economic holdings, consolidated business support behind a military coup that overthrew democracy and pushed Egypt back toward corrupt dictatorship. Business had relatively little choice, but nonetheless played an important role building a new authoritarian regime.

After the historical cycle which started with the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War, all of Kurdistan was affected by war and violence. Between 1979 and 2003, two structural dynamics of the Kurdish conflict, which had determined Kurdish history, have also been radicalized and militarized: the centrifugal one tearing apart the Kurdish space along the line of the state borders, linguistic and sectarian zones, partisan traditions and political cultures, and centripetal one unifying it across these many borders under the idea and ideal of ‘Kurdishness’ and by many forms of pacific or armed mobility. This tension was not an easy one to bear, but it has been managed, although at a high cost. The 1980s (and as far as Turkey is concerned 1990s) have probably constituted the darkest period of the Kurdish history with a rough estimation of Kurdish victims, namely, civilians, reaching some 200,000 people. By the beginning of the 2000s, however, Kurds’ survival as a part of Iran, Turkey, Iraq, Syria and thus, in the trans-frontier Kurdistan, seemed to be out of any major threat.