Registered: March 2004 Location: Brooklyn! Posts: 518
Sun August 12, 2007 9:14am
What does Gastarbeiter mean?
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Valery Senior Member
Registered: October 2006 Posts: 397
Sun August 12, 2007 11:11am
It's German. Means "guest worker". As you may know the USSR desintegrated more than 15 years ago. Muslim republics obtained freedom, independence but not prosperity. So now the majority of manual workers here are citizens of former sovjet republics. (Yes, Moscow now looks very much like Paris). And the "guests" tend to stay here, bring their families etc, etc. Why are they called by a German term? It's historical, WWII and all that. Nobody here knows German, but some words merged into Russian. And "gastarbaiter" is one of them.
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