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Feature: Germany's first generation of Turkish immigrants faces a foreign retirement

"Looking back, I don't even know why I came to Germany. Things were going fine for me in Turkey."

Yusuf Mermer, Turkish immigrant

The last cups of Turkish black tea had been drained, the platters of olives and goat cheese cleared, but the snowy-haired Turks lingered at the table.

"Of course I always think about going back," said Yusuf Mermer, 69, who left Ankara in 1969 for the Ruhr, where he operated a forklift.

He now lives in a nursing home here.

"I have nieces and nephews in Turkey, but I would just be a burden on them," he said.

His voice cracked and tears trickled down his creased face.

"Looking back, I don't even know why I came to Germany," he said. "Things were going fine for me in Turkey."

Four decades after the first Turks arrived, they are reaching retirement in a land that still feels foreign.

For Mermer and many others, it is a bleak time with the recognition that they will live out their days in a place where they had planned to stay only a few years.

Germany never planned on them staying either. Many of these immigrants do not have the savings or pension and health benefits to afford a nursing home with round-the-clock care.

The government has to pick up the shortfall -- an unexpected payback for the long years of service of these guest workers.

Socially isolated after decades of living in Turkish enclaves, these accidental Germans often speak little or no German.

And having toiled in low-paying, physically taxing jobs, they are in poor health relative to native Germans of comparable age.

But they do share one thing with Western Europeans: They cannot rely on their busy children to take care of them. Three cities are trying different approaches to help them.

In Berlin, the country's first private nursing home exclusively for Turkish people opened last year. Called Turk Huzur Evi, it will eventually offer beds for 155 people.

It has a Muslim prayer room, with a visiting imam who preaches regularly, and serves Turkish food and meat prepared according to Islamic rules.

In Frankfurt, the state of Hesse finances a retirement home with a section for Muslims. Its 11 beds are filled, the majority with Turks, though there have been Afghans.

Here in Duisburg, the nursing home, known as Haus am Sandberg and run by the German Red Cross, has 15 Turkish residents -- eight women and seven men -- and nearly 80 Germans. They share airy quarters around a two-story atrium.

Children and grandchildren are the main reason these Turkish immigrants stay.

With the passage of time, many of them have few friends or family members left back home.

The German government, which has struggled with immigration policy in general, has yet to come to grips with aging immigrants. In the 1980s, it tried to entice people to return home by paying them cash.

About 250,000 foreigners -- mostly Turks -- did leave by 1984, but the flow soon dwindled because there were few jobs in Turkey then.

With only 4,000 Turks a year returning home these days, the German government and Turkish groups will have to share the burden of providing culturally aware nursing homes and caring for the growing number of retirees, said Faruk Sen, director of the Center for Turkish Studies in Essen.

The German and Turkish residents of Haus am Sandberg are experiencing genuine integration for the first time, after a lifetime in what social scientists have called "parallel societies."
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