Time was you couldn’t move for Brits in Germany. First in military deployments in the Cold War, young British men came to Germany in the tens of thousands. Then in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as work for British labourers and tradesmen evaporated with the collapse of British industry, another wave arrived: the migrant worker.
Unlike neighbouring Ireland, Britain does not conceptualise itself as a country with a roaming population in search of work, yet this is exactly what happened. Germany’s ‘Gastarbeiter’ (guest worker) programme historically gave opportunities to Southern European, Balkans, and Turkish workers. Indeed, Italians, Yugoslavs, and Turks flocked to Germany in the hundreds of thousands. But in the ’80s, Germany’s construction sites began to fill with British workers. At German train stations, where migrant workers congregated to get word of the latest from home, Brits became more prominent and British papers began to occupy the stands.
Brits had a firm advantage over their fellow migrant workers. Having served their national service in close contact with NATO, particularly American soldiers, and sharing a Germanic language, it was far easier for German foremen to communicate with them. A construction site division of labour with German foremen, British skilled workers, and the lowest rungs occupied by Portuguese and Poles was common.
Here many British found what they could not in their devastated home communities: free-flowing beer, good parties, the chance of a decent pay packet, and a boisterous workplace with firm comradery.
As the Cold War wrapped up, many of Britain’s soldiers were sent home. Some, having built lives and families there, stayed in Germany. But the party wasn’t over yet for the migrant workers. Even as Britain’s beleaguered economy finally recovered in the early ’90s, Germany’s reunification brought a construction boom. As late as 1996 there were around 80,000 British industrial workers in Germany, a mix of kosher decently paid workers, and under-the-table payment recipients in the brutally competitive migrant labour market.
Ironically, it was closer EU integration that put an end to many a Brit’s chances in Germany. Enforcement of equal treatment among member states’ workers meant Brits by law had to be paid the same as their German counterparts, giving them very little advantage. Poles, since Poland was not a Member State at the time, retained their wage advantage. As with the soldiers, a decent number who had made lives and families in Germany stayed, but most went home.
Something died in British culture then: a willingness to move, to look beyond the horizon for work. Many of the old industrial towns are still mired in poverty, yet the generation that embarked for the continent had a critical advantage: they’d had training and education in the last days of British industry. Shaped in factories, mines, and construction sites they had the opportunity, skills, and the community of fellows to succeed in packing up and moving abroad.
Their successors have had no such opportunities. On-the-job skilled training is all but gone, the Polytechnics so crucial for skilled training have been gutted and rebranded, and what labourer and trades work there is has, ironically, been filled by Poles.
Much of the country has become irreconcilable with Europe and the notion of free movement of workers. Perhaps the memory of being booted out of Continental work thanks to the EU is part of why Britain’s industrial towns voted so strongly for Brexit. They’ve seen opportunities at home and abroad dwindle, and seem to have forgotten what it’s like to be a migrant worker.
Today’s Brits in Germany are a very different breed. Those who settled down have been supplemented by metropolitan professionals, numbering in total a modest 100,000. As their predecessors were undermined by EU integration, Britain’s decision to extricate itself from the Union is doing the same for them. Applications for German passports among Brits have climbed 361%, and those who cannot obtain citizenship are feeling insecure in their future.
With Brexit imminent, Britain’s rich ties with Germany seem consigned to fading memory and nostalgia. Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, the 1983 programme that documented the lives of half a dozen fictional British labourers in Düsseldorf in its first season, was voted ITV’s most popular programme ever in 2015. Yet Britain seems to doomed to lose the opportunity and drive to work abroad, and to know what it’s like to find pay, grog, friends, and even family in a new land.
Photo: Laura Lauragais/Creative Commons