BERLIN: Mustafa Makinist's father arrived in Germany from Turkey in 1973 with plans to work for five years. He stayed on, working as a machine repairman at Siemens for 25 years.
Despite having a house in Turkey, the 68-year-old retiree still spends half the year in Berlin. Makinist, 40, is planning to rent an apartment there for when his father and mother are too old to travel between their adopted and home countries. But he dismissed a common belief that Turkish families care for their elderly relatives in large households consisting of several generations.
"The second generation has assimilated, and in Berlin the apartments are very small," he said.
Germany is grappling with an unexpected consequence of the industrialized world's aging population: how to integrate its immigrant pensioners.
For decades, the authorities assumed that Germany's "guest workers," recruited during the boom years after World War II, would eventually return home. It has now woken up to the fact that many of its 2.5 million people of Turkish origin are here to stay, and a large number are nearing retirement.
"For a long time Germany didn't envision itself as a country of immigration," said Ulrika Zabel, an intercultural officer with the charity Caritas. "That caused our problem with seniors - we didn't expect they would stay." Caritas, together with a private company, Vitanas, will open Germany's fourth multicultural housing center for older citizens next year in Berlin.
Because of security fears about youth violence, integration efforts in Germany have focused up to now on helping young people. However, some organizations are starting to draw attention to the generation now reaching retirement age, and companies are addressing the niche.
About 18 percent of immigrants in Germany are over 55, according to Federal Statistical Office data from 2006. More than 700,000 of these older immigrants are in the final decade of work before they are eligible to draw a pension.
While it is not known how many of these immigrants will need some kind of senior care outside the home, it is precisely that uncertainty that is causing government officials, private-sector companies and charities to focus on the issue.
The most recent German report on aging, published in 2005, said older migrants should be one of the country's highest priorities. Immigrant seniors have more health problems, lower incomes and less knowledge about what social services are available than native Germans, the report found.
Immigrants who have been in Germany more than 25 years have generated average tax revenue of €850, or $1.2 billion, a year per person, the study found, while the government has spent about €5 million per year on programs for immigrant seniors.
Senior immigrants are also less likely than native Germans to get a public pension, though they are eligible if they have paid into the public system. The report found that in 2002, about 79 percent of Turkish immigrants older than age 65 were drawing a public pension, compared with about 96 percent of Germans.
For those who do have funds, private care for the aged is widespread. Vitanas is not the only private operator to enter the immigrant senior market. Marseille-Kliniken, a company based in Berlin, opened a care home in February 2007 offering "culturally sensitive" care for Turkish pensioners in Berlin.
Besides a prayer room facing Mecca and Turkish tea, the home has bilingual employees and lets women be cared for by women and men by men, employees at the home said. There are other culturally diverse senior housing centers in Frankfurt, the city of Duisburg, near the Dutch border, and in Berlin's heavily Turkish Kreuzberg district.
Some other European countries are working on similar projects, said Harry Mertens, senior project manager at Movisie, a center for social development in the Netherlands.
Britain and the Netherlands offer mixed or culturally specific housing with a combination of independent apartments and communal gardens or kitchens, Mertens said, and in The Hague there are housing projects for retirees from Surinam and China.
Cultural sensitivity is especially important as a set routine dictates the rhythms of life in a care home, said Berin Arukaslan, a family therapist and board member of the Turkish Union in Berlin-Brandenburg.
"I wouldn't want to live in a house where I thought I had to live a regulated life that didn't include what's important to me," Arukaslan said. "For example, Turkish and Arab migrants have large families. I understand that in a normal German care home it can be a problem if the family comes too often with too many people and stays too long. They're side by side with German gramps and grans who only see their kids at Christmas and Easter."
Zabel, of Caritas, illustrated the challenges with the story of an elderly Turkish woman eating a solitary dinner in her care home's kitchen.
Uncomfortable with food not prepared according to Muslim religious rules, she had eaten little in the dining hall. Her caregivers assumed she did not want to sit with men and sent her to the kitchen. Language barriers meant the care home had to call Zabel, after complaints from the kitchen staff that the woman was in the way, to learn the truth.
The Victor Gollancz House Intercultural Senior Center in Frankfurt, which does outreach work with neighboring mosques, has equipped a prayer room to face Mecca, offers halal meals and holds Muslim religious services on Fridays. Turkish immigrants occupy 12 of the 123 rooms, and about 15 percent of the home's staff speak Turkish.
To Makinist, and other relatives of aging immigrants, the efforts are noticed. "Berlin society plays out in its senior housing," he said. "It's in these kinds of facilities that the city's diverse culture is lived."
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