Cultural Centres and Guest Worker Integration in Stuttgart, Germany, 1960–1976

This paper explores the role that cultural centres played in the integration of guest workers into the city of Stuttgart, Germany. It argues that the centres were initially used as instruments of social control, but after the mid-1960s, as local authorities increasingly envisioned the guest workers as a permanent part of West German society, the focus of the centres was on the integration of guest workers, particularly the ‘second generation’, into not just the economic, but also the social and civic life of Stuttgart and to further cultural understanding between them and West Germans. Furthermore, the paper shows that the centres acted as spaces in which the guest workers themselves could advance their own interests within Stuttgart and many times were sites where they acted out ethnic and political conflicts from their homelands.