‘When I Marry a Mohammedan’: Migration and the Challenges of Interethnic Marriages in Post-War Germany

Abstract

AbstractDiscussions about intermarriage between foreign Muslim men and German Christian women from the 1950s to the 1970s shaped concepts of Islam, gender and difference found in more recent integration debates. Those insisting on inherent incompatibilities between Germans and Turks since the 1970s have drawn on these tropes developed decades earlier. Yet the post-war context differed from the later period in three important ways: the Muslim foreigners were students and interns, not guestworkers; it was German Christian women (not foreign Muslim women in Germany) who were the presumed victims of Muslim men; and it was principally national church institutions that formulated the language about difference.