The governor of the northern German state of Lower Saxony has appointed Germany's first ever Muslim minister of Turkish origin at the government level. In a reshuffle announced on Monday by Governor Christian Wulff, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party, 38-year-old Aygül Özkan became the region's new minister for social affairs.
"I am aware that I am a role model," said Özkan, who was born in Hamburg in 1971. Her parents moved to Germany from Turkey in the 1960s like thousands of other Turks invited by the German government as "guest workers" to help make up for a shortage of labor following World War II.