This dissertation investigates the intersections of education, Islam, and knowledge production in the history of postwar migration to West Germany. It focuses on how Germans and Turks grappled with the permanent presence of Turkish guest workers, refugees, and their families in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) from the 1960s onward. To understand how ideas about this population of Turkish Germans shaped notions of race, culture, and belonging in both countries, two surprisingly under-researched groups are used as a lens: Turkish teachers and imams. Both were charged with seeing to the educational and spiritual needs of what was West Germany's largest immigrant population by 1973. As such, policies, practices, and debates surrounding the hiring, supervision, and activities of relatively small numbers of teachers and imams offer insight into what a broad spectrum of state and civil society stakeholders in both countries believed they knew about Turkish Germans, what differentiated them from the German majority or Turks in Turkey proper, and what interventions were made necessary by that difference. Teachers and imams were simultaneously actors producing knowledge about Turks in the FRG for audiences in both countries, agents tasked with carrying out interventions at the behest of various stakeholders on the basis of this knowledge, and, as Turkish Germans, were themselves subjects of this knowledge regime. As such, they reveal the complicated dynamics underlying why and how what was known about Turkish German difference changed over time. This in turn identifies shifts in ideas about the nation, race, and Islam in Turkey and Germany.Comparing teachers and imams and using sources in Turkish and German as diverse as theater, poetry, oral history, diplomatic correspondence, and the academic and popular press, this dissertation breaks with several common scholarly and popular assumptions. First, it demonstrates the contingency of the emergence in the 1980s of Islam as the most salient aspect of Turkish difference and an essential element of Turkish national identity, rather than a marker of membership in the broader, international "Muslim world." The project identifies the centrality of Islam to the racialization of Turkish difference and the role of Turkish expertise in this process of essentialization. Second, the comparison between teachers and imams highlights the contextual nature of the construction of this essential difference. Even as imams were positioned as experts with proprietary knowledge of Turkish Islam, Turkish teachers lost their privileged status and their cultural and linguistic knowledge was increasingly understood as backwards and irrelevant in the context of the universalistic German school. Thus, Turkish difference in German schools was perceived differently than when it was imagined in a mosque or Koran course. The dissertation offers an account of the development and implications of this interplay between belonging and exclusion, and knowledge and ignorance. This allows it to complicate previous literature which has located German policies and attitudes toward foreigners in the legacies of the Third Reich or in an unchanging and particularly German ethnoracial conception of the nation.
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