You are welcome to rearrange the postcards or take them with you.

These are photographs of people who came to Austria as so-called “guest workers”. One of them is Mehmet Emir. In 1964, his father was one of the first “guest workers” to come to Austria from Turkey. Mehmet joined him in 1981 when he was just 16 years old.

“I had pictured my father’s life and work to be totally different. On photographs my father regularly sent home from Vienna, he was well dressed and stood in front of different sights. My father also never spoke about the hard work or living in sparsely furnished barracks when he came to Turkey once or twice a year to see the family.”

Mehmet Emir took all of these black-and-white photographs and one of the colour photographs in the workers’ living quarters provided by the company he and his father worked for. If you look closely, you can see the room that three men shared. They used old Turkish newspapers as a “tablecloth”. One photo shows the hallway of the two-story wooden barracks. The men hammered nails into the wall so they had a place to hang their work clothes, and their asphalt-covered shoes are also in the hallway. There were 20 rooms opposite one another.

In 1964 Austria opened an office in Istanbul to recruit workers from Turkey. Two years later, Austria made a recruitment agreement with Yugoslavia as well. Although the Austrian economy flourished after the Second World War, there were not enough labourers in the workforce. The economic upturn would never have been possible without the men and women who came to work in Austria.

For the most part, “guest workers” were poorly paid and had to work long hours. Despite this, for many, working in Austria was still a better alternative to the more difficult economic situations in Turkey and Yugoslavia. Austria hadn’t anticipated that many guest workers would remain in Austria—a fact that failed to be recognized for a very long time.

After three and a half years, Mehmet Emir quit his job building roads. He made a living acting in the theatre and playing music, and later went on to study at the Academy of Fine Arts. He has been writing for the newspaper “Augustin” for many years and currently works at the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

At another station in the museum, you can watch “Between Worlds”, a video piece that tells the story of Mehmet Emir and his family. To get to the video from here, walk left past the motorcycle, and the video is on your left below the hat.