There remains a gap in the collective memory of the so-called ‘Guest Worker Era,’ between the ‘economic miracle’ of the 1950s and the ‘welcoming culture’ of the 2010 and 2020s. From the first labor recruitment agreement of 1955 until the ‘recruitment stop’ announced at the end of 1973, millions of people came from countries such as Italy, Greece, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Spain, and Morocco to Germany. Since this period, their work and their lives have shaped the nation—including Stuttgart. Yet histories, experiences, and traces of this time often go untold in the country’s official memory culture.

As part of the project Heimat(en) schaffa: Invisible Feelings, Visible Realities, these stories will be brought to the fore. A participatory guided tour of Stuttgart’s inner-city neighborhood Bad Cannstatt will visit locations that were important and remain important for the city’s migrant community. The workshop is an invitation to ask questions about belonging, exclusion, resistance, and memory in urban space.

Together with participants from various Stuttgart communities, the tour will explore how the experience of Heimat is connected to places, emotions, and (in)visibilities. What memories do people have of train stations, residences, meeting spots, community rooms, and businesses? What emotions are bound up with these locations—hope, alienation, pride, or pain? And what narratives of ‘German’ memory culture are challenged by this?

The tour combines a dialogical urban tour with biographical impulses, collective narrations, micro-performances, and audio documentation. Participants are invited to share memory fragments, to reread locations in the city, and to inscribe their own narratives into urban space. The workshop is open for anyone interested, for people from migrant communities, for initiatives, memory workers, urban residents, as well as for young people and adults who are interested in plural remembrance culture, urban history, and post-migrant perspectives.

Guided tour led by Lucija Marosević, Lernort Geschichte Stuttgart; moderated by Vatan Ukaj, WERTansich(t)