Turkish migration to Germany that started in the early 1960s was essentially a response to a call concerning demand for labour on a temporary basis. However, when the gastarbeiter scheme translated into a permanent citizenship, return to homeland became a myth which was environed not only by remembering of past images of home, a nostalgia but migrants yet to form transnational bonds of re-membrance across home and host country by creating home-based associations to remember and practice home-values, religious organizations not to forget their home culture, imbiss shops to introduce Turkish food as a marker of identification with Turkishness along with renaming streets as if they live in their neighborhood at home, overall, creating Turkish spaces. By the time economic crisis hit and followed by a further recruitment ban; an act in 1983 was officially introduced as a return incentive to mainly unemployed migrants in Germany. Since the myth of return eventually turns into a reality for the ones who decided to return to Turkey, their return rather than being a rupture in the migratory cycle, becomes a continuation of migration, endowed with transnationality which emphasizes on the individual links that returnees forge with host country that stretch to their post-return lives. In this regard, questioning returnee's ties with hostland, this study focuses on the mnemonic links of six first and second generation Turkish return migrant families from Germany to understand the role of host country in returnee's imaginary in their present setting. As travelling memories, narration of a past reproduces one's ties with the country left behind through incorporating its memory-image in homeland, bringing together memories of past and reconstructing them into living memories in present that allow for their translation into practices, mentality, ideas that inhabit present setting, reconstituting the consequences of their lived experiences while shaping their sense of belonging to both home and host land (s)electively. In so doing, returnee's relationship with the host country and its influence do not end. In addition, as vehicles of memory, family photo albums of returnees would be used since they are dynamic in sense of interpreting past, most commonly expressed through articulation (of the past), comparison (between there and here), negotiation (incorporating past into present) and imagination (how it could be) ensuring the continuity of migratory experience.They as well work in terms of creating a transnational unity between the hostland and homeland by the act of looking and narrating. Therefore, this study mainly draws upon life story interviews and photo-elicitation method as a way of telling story of one's life, considering one's ongoing relation with the country left behind through memories, reconstructed both verbally and visually.
