Chapter "Almanya - Welcome in Germany": didactic film material

What is life like when you come to Germany as the 1,000,001 Turkish guest workers at the end of the sixties? You wonder about toilets with seats, about giant rats on leashes, and you feel left out when your own children prefer to talk in the foreign language instead of their mother tongue and think Christmas is great. But the guest worker stayed and found a home together with his family in Germany.

ALMANYA - Welcome to Germany tells with a lot of humor and empathy the story of Hüseyin Yilmaz and his family, who leave their home country Turkey to support the German economic miracle as guest workers. The very personal film of the Samdereli sisters is partly based on their own experiences. This allows the viewers to participate in a world between Orient and Occident, in a large cross-cultural and cross-generational family. In a ver entertaining way.

"Who and what am I actually - German or Turk?" This is the question six-year-old Cenk Yilmaz asks himself when neither his Turkish nor his German classmates choose him for their soccer team. To comfort Cenk, his 22-year-old cousin Canan tells him the story of her grandfather Hüseyin, who came to Germany as a Turkish guest worker in the late 1960s and later brought his wife and children to "Almanya". Much time has passed since then, and Germany has long since become the family's home. One fine evening, Hüseyin surprises his loved ones at a big family reunion with the news that he has bought a house in Turkey and now wants to travel with them to their old home. This raises the question of where "home" actually is for one or the other. But objections are not tolerated and so the whole family sets off for Turkey. A journey full of memories, quarrels and reconciliations begins, but then the family trip takes an unexpected turn...

Topics; family, migration, integration, identity, German history, Turkey, multicultural society, prejudices

Trailer

Learning Objectives
Students can:

• express opinions about the movie poster and title
• understand and analyze film sequences and dialogues
• read and talk about the problems of Turkish immigrant workers and their children.
• discuss prejudices against other cultures

Students know:

• about German history and society in the 1950s and 1960s