Food for Thought: Rethinking the History of Migration to West Germany Through the Migrant Restaurant Business

Abstract

Research on migration to Germany tends to concentrate on the so-called ‘guest worker’ system and neglects migrants who opened up businesses of their own, above all in food retail and the restaurant sector. After a brief sketch of the history and structure of the migrant restaurant trade in West Germany, this article focuses on those ‘guest workers’ who were specifically recruited for employment in the West German hotel and restaurant business, but who later established ethnic restaurants and thus contributed crucially to the internationalization of food consumption in postwar Germany. In contrast to the US or UK, where the starting conditions for foreign and native entrepreneurs do not differ in legal respects, the state Aliens Department in (West) Germany exerted – and still exerts – an enormous influence on the self-employment of foreigners. Migrant restaurateurs in the FRG could not expect equal treatment. Their applications were subjected to an ‘examination of need’ (Bedürfnisprüfung), that is the authorities had to acknowledge a particular local need or a significant economic interest for a foreigner’s restaurant or snack bar before permission to open a business was granted.