IBRAHIM HALIL YILMAZ

Volkswagen worker, works council member and bridge-builder between Wolfsburg and Kayseri

The first thing Ibrahim Yılmaz bought with his first German wage packet, in the spring of 1964, was not a coat or a radio but a stamp, so that he could write home to say he had arrived. He kept the receipt for the rest of his life.

He was born in 1941 in Yahyalı, a town at the foot of the Taurus mountains in central Turkey, the son of a wheat farmer. At twenty-three he answered a recruitment notice for guest workers, passed a medical examination in Istanbul, and travelled three days by train to Wolfsburg, where Volkswagen needed hands for the Beetle line. He lived in a company barracks with eleven other men and learned German from the foreman and from Frau Kruse, who sold bread on the corner and corrected his grammar for free. He stayed thirty-seven years.

In 1978 his colleagues elected him to the works council, and he served until his retirement in 2001, the quiet man who translated contracts, argued for prayer rooms and for fair arrangements for workers who needed to travel home to Anatolia, and sat on both sides of the table without losing the trust of either. When Volkswagen's apprentices began to include the children of Turkish workers, Ibrahim made sure every one of them knew whose shoulders they stood on.

He married Fatma in 1967 and brought her to Wolfsburg a year later. They raised Murat, Ayşe and Elif in a flat in Detmerode with a balcony full of geraniums and a kitchen where the tea glass was never empty. Every August the family drove to Turkey in a succession of Volkswagens, three days across the Balkans with the back seat piled with gifts. He supported VfL Wolfsburg on Saturdays, Kayserispor on principle, and was, by the end, the only man in his street who could explain the offside rule in two languages.

Ibrahim died on 25 March 2023, in the first days of Ramadan, at Klinikum Wolfsburg, with Fatma and the children beside him. After the funeral prayer in Wolfsburg, he was flown home to be buried in Yahyalı, in the earth he had left sixty years before. He leaves Fatma, Murat, Ayşe, Elif and nine grandchildren who called him Dede.

“A man who is polite in two languages is never lost.”