ABSTRACT
The issue of the future of Germany's four million guestworkers is, if not exactly a hot issue in the Federal Republic, certainly a simmering one. The number of non-Germans has increased more or less continuously since the early 1960s, when the German government engaged in massive labor recruitment. Like foreigners beginning new lives in other settings, guestworkers in Germany are characteristically poorly educated, not proficient in simple skills of the language, and confused by the conflicting values of old-world parents and the new-world environment. As posed throughout Society and Democracy in Germany, Ralf Dahrendorf's central questions ask why the modal form of Western democracy seemed constantly alien in Germany, why such aberrant political forms as national socialism were ever even tolerated, and why, even in 1965, "so few in Germany embraced the principle of liberal democracy". Germany has not traditionally been a nation of immigrants.
