As the united Germany enters the twenty-first century and officially declares itself a country of immigration, it is acknowledging a state of affairs which has existed de facto for at least fifty years. The country which is now contemplating a new wave of young, skilled workers from abroad has yet to come to terms with the legacy of the recruitment of foreign workers in the postwar economic boom. The fact that the Anwerbestopp in 1973 resulted in the transformation of migrant labour into minority populations is well-documented, as is the predominance of the Turkish minority. In 1973 Turks constituted a quarter of the non-German workforce, rising to a third by 1990, by which time the Turkish population numbered nearly two million. This chapter will explore emerging identity-formations in the Turkish-German diaspora as exemplified in the literary work of Emine Sevgi Özdamar. Özdamar came to Berlin in 1965 as a Gastarbeiterin, working in factories and housed in a hostel with other workers. She also started to learn German, became involved in the theatre, and became politicised in the student protests which were reaching a peak in 1967. She then trained as an actress in Istanbul, but returned to Germany in 1976, where she continues to act, direct and write for the theatre. To date she has published two novels and two volumes of short prose.

She is undoubtedly the most prominent and successful example of the minority writing, or MigrantInnenliteratur, which is becoming an increasingly popular focus of German Studies in Great Britain and North America, but remains very marginal in German Germanistik, with the exception of those institutes specialising in Deutsch als Fremdsprache and the associated discipline Interkulturelle Germanistik.