Excerpt:
The first time Ömer Küçükbay felt homesick for Germany, he was lying on a cot in a military barracks north of Antalya. He was 20 years old, it was 2 a.m., and an officer was bellowing at him that he should go keep watch. First, though, someone had to translate the officer's command, since Küçükbay spoke no Turkish. He was fluent only in a Bavarian dialect of German.
The son of Turkish guest workers in Eggenfelden, Lower Bavaria, he had signed up for military service in Turkey on a whim, to express affection for country he really only knew from family vacations. "But somehow I was always just a foreigner in Germany too," he says. "To the kids in my class, I was simply a Turk. So I wanted to see what it's like to be Turkish."
The experiment lasted three months, at which point Küçükbay got tired of being yelled at and crawling through dust. He went back to Eggenfelden and swore never to return to Turkey.