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 MIDDELICHER STRASSE In the 1950s, several northern European countries signed “guest-worker” agreements with southern countries to lure manual laborers, who were supposed to stay for a couple of years and then go home. Germany and Turkey signed one in 1961, and over the next 12 years hundreds of thousands of Turks answered the call—but not all returned home. By 1973, when the program was canceled, nearly 1 million Turks were living in Germany. Today, approximately 2.5 million Turks live there. Unal Nas, a Turkish engineer who arrived in Germany as a guest worker in 1966, opened his first shop selling pita bread in 1975, after cashing in his savings to buy a German bakery. Under a 1927 agreement, Turks in Germany were not permitted to own bakeries. The agreement was abandoned in 1983, and Nas became the legal owner. Today, he has a fleet of 35 trucks delivering more than 40 kinds of baked goods. With an unemployment rate of 10.6%, Germany does not lack workers; it lacks modern skills — and is once again looking outside its borders to fill that need.
— Steve Zwick |
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E-mail your letter to the editor
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Gelsenkirchen
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Unal Nas
Turkish immigrant to Germany and owner of Elan Bakeries
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Posted Sunday, August 10, 2003; 16.11BST
I came to Germany on a six-month leave of absence from my job in Turkey. But the engineer in me got hooked on the systematic, planned way of doing things.
I asked my wife if we could stay, and she said yes. The opportunities for education here are amazing. I took a business course at the University of Bonn that got me thinking about entrepreneurship, and then I turned to the needs of all these Turkish immigrants.
When Herr Nolte, a local baker, told me traditional German family bakeries had no future, I told him about Turkish pita. Then he said, ‘Maybe you’ve got a shot.’ His master baker was a real bread scientist, and we worked well and grew slowly. After 1983, we had the legal status to get the engineering done right.
Still, it took a decade to develop a pita-pressing machine, because the dough is so delicate. Herr Nolte was right — the kind of family bakery he ran is a thing of the past. But the future still belongs to the self-employed.
You just have to roll with the changes. After all, just when we figured out how to run a pita press, Turks started buying whole-grain German breads and Germans started buying Turkish bread!
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