Acı Vatan (bitter homeland) revisited: Cold War labor migration and the transformation of the Turkish family

Abstract

This article revisits the idiom acı vatan (“bitter homeland”) as a key Cold War emotional framework through which Turkish society interpreted labor migration to West Germany from the late 1960s onward. Treating acı vatan as an “emotional regime” (Reddy), it argues that migration reorganized intimacy—marriage, parenthood, domestic labor, and patriarchal authority—in ways inseparable from Turkey’s deepening integration into US-led Cold War structures (Truman Doctrine, Marshall Plan, NATO) and the 1961 recruitment agreement with the Federal Republic of Germany. Situating Turkish cinema as a major cultural institution that translated geopolitical pressures into everyday moral feeling, the article analyzes three films—Dönüş (1972), Otobüs (1975), and Almanya Acı Vatan (1979)—as a Cold War archive of transnational family life. Dönüş foregrounds women’s expanded labor and the fragility of long-distance patriarchal authority; Otobüs stages migration without family to expose abandonment and the collapse of relational infrastructures; Almanya Acı Vatan dramatizes moral panic around female mobility and the sabotage of women’s migrant potential through patriarchal crisis. Drawing on Cold War cultural history (May, Westad, Klein, Kwon), affect theory (Ahmed), and transnational/diaspora frameworks (Brah, Hall, Gilroy), the article reads film as interpretive historical text (Rosenstone), showing how Cold War geopolitics became lived experience through the reorganization of care, honor, and belonging across borders.