Migration in der europäischen Geschichte seit dem späten Mittelalter [2002]

In Germany, migration research is still a relatively young line of research. Several obstacles complicated a critical recovery of research concepts on the history of population and migration that had been shaped as early as in the 1920s. This was the result of the multilayered disavowal of academic demography - because of its role in Nazi Germany, because of the long-lasting primate of history of politics in post-WW ll Germany, and finally because of the late emergence of the history of society. This situation has profoundly changed during the last decades of the twentieth century. Reasons were the increasing historical distance to the ‘fall of man’ of demography in Nazi Germany, the reorientation of historiography in the context of critical social and cultural sciences; the inclusion of labor-market research into migration research, and the shaping of interdisciplinary and integral research concepts

Von Unworten zu Untaten: Kulturängste, Populismus und politische Feindbilder in der deutschen Migrations- und Asyldiskussion zwischen 'Gastarbeiterfrage' und 'Flüchtlingskrise' [2016]

The immigration society in Germany is divided: Cultural pragmatists, on the one hand, have long since accepted cultural diversity as a very normal day-to-day experience. Cultural pessimists, on the other hand, are driven by the historically mistaken search for a way back to cultural homogeneity; a situation that has never existed in German history. Virulent defensive attitudes against an Islam which is equated with terroristic Islamism, against refugees and asylum seekers as well as against so-called poverty migrants, especially Roma people from south-east-Europe, are today’s connecting themes that keep together all culturalistic, radical racist and right-wing extremistic ideas and movements in Germany and Europe. On top of that, a new and growing anti-Semitism is widespread even among Muslim immigrants. Such defensive attitudes provoked a growing xeno-phobic aggressiveness among radical groups and were a motivating factor for attacks on accommodations of asylum seekers, mosques, and synagogues. In this context even more dangerous than populist attitudes of politicians is their tacit consent with hate speeches about immigrants, refugees, Muslims, and so-called poverty migrants

Blockade und Befreiung: Identitätskrise, Ersatzdebatten und neue Selbstbilder in der Einwanderungsgesellschaft [2013]

For decades, German scientists, writers, and experts from many fields related to immigration and integration have permanently – but unsuccessfully – been prompting politicians and the government to abandon populistic defensive attitudes against immigration. Instead they called, unsuccessfully too, for the shaping of clear concepts for migration control and integration promotion. Furthermore, they demanded not to spread fake news about ‘failed integration’ but instead to report on the in fact relatively successful integration. However, it was not before the first decade of the twenty-first century that powerful state initiatives were established to promote integration and, to a certain extent, also to re-orientate migration politics. This turn, however, came too late for many people in the country. The result was a paradoxical tension between integration processes that were successful on the whole and wrong perceptions of ‘failed integration.’ Ways out of this dilemma of socially and culturally deficient self-descriptions might be found by open discussions about new narratives activating cultural and social cohesion in the immigrant society with its multitude of identities

Kritik und Gewalt: Sarrazin-Debatte, 'Islamkritik' und Terror in der Einwanderungsgesellschaft [2013/2014]

Since the late twentieth century, most European societies turned into immigration societies. An immigration society underlies a multiform and complex social and cultural process, becoming increasingly differentiated and leading to an acceleration of changes in social structures and forms of life. This development caused cultural anxiety and mental stress for many people. The widespread skepticism about lowly qualified immigrants, especially from Muslim countries, was enforced by Thilo Sarrazin’s anti-Islamic bestseller ‘Deutschland schafft sich ab’ (‘Germany Is Doing Away With Itself‘), published in 2010. Against the background of ambiguities and uncertainties as well as a growing readiness for outrage deriving from many other reasons, too, the so-called Sarrazin debate revealed far-reaching, deep socio-political divides and tensions within the German immigration society. At the same time, police uncovered long-lasting anti-immigrant terrorism against Muslim immigrants. The German murderers obviously understood their actions ideologically as a form of self-defense against the threat of Islamic transformation of immigrant societies in Europe

Bewegungsformen und Bestimmungsfaktoren transnationaler und interner Migration in den deutschen Nordostgebieten vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg: Entwurf eines heuristischen Modells [1979/2005]

During the secular change of Prussia from an agrarian state with uprising industries towards an industrial state with a strong and stable agrarian sector, transnational and internal mobility became mass phenomena in the German Northeast before World War I. Regional differences aside, the most important components of this mobility were overseas emigration and remigration, continental immigration, primarily from middle-east and south-east Europe, as well as several forms of internal migration. Thereby we have to distinguish between permanent and temporary migrations, between migrations within the same economic sector (intra-sectoral migrations, e.g. within the agrarian sector), and migrations across sectors (inter-sectoral migrations, e.g. from the agrarian towards the industrial sector). Driven by partly comparable and partly different motivations, this mobility shaped more or less long-lasting migration traditions within a highly complex migration system

Der Traum vom 'Export der sozialen Frage' durch imperiale Expansion und koloniale Auswanderung: der Fall Friedrich Fabri [1975/2005]

In German nationalistic historiography, the director of the largest German evangelical mission society, the Rhenish Mission in Wuppertal-Barmen, was called ‘father of the German colonial movement’. Starting point of his colonial propaganda was, on the one hand, his interest in securing political stability through colonial control in the south-west-African mission areas. On the other hand, he feared that the widening gap between rapid population growth and lacking employment opportunities might cause a social revolution in Germany. Against the background of the severe economic crisis since the early 1870s, this anxiety was widespread in imperial Germany. As a solution, Fabri suggested state 'emigration politics' steering emigration into a 'new Germany overseas' to be shaped by informal expansion in South America and colonial expansion in Africa. His expansionistic propaganda followed British examples (Wakefield, Torrens). He understood emigration as a ‚social safety valve’ against the danger of a social revolution and 'emigration politics' as a part of social policy. His expansionist theorems had no chance in German colonial expansion, although they were leading ideas within the German colonial movement in the early 1880s

Vom Export der Sozialen Frage zur importierten Sozialen Frage: Deutschland im transnationalen Wanderungsgeschehen seit der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts [1984/1985]

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Germans abroad and foreigners in Germany have experienced the most various forms of emigration and immigration: the older German emigration to eastern and south-east Europe, especially to Russia and Austria-Hungary; the transatlantic mass emigration from nineteenth-century Germany; the mass movement of foreign migrant workers, especially from Congress Poland and Austrian Galicia, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; forced labor by foreign workers ('Fremdarbeiter') in Nazi Germany; emigration from Nazi Germany on political, ideological, and racial grounds; forced resettlement in German-occupied Europe during World War II; movements of millions of expellees and refugees at the end of the war and in its aftermath; the admission of foreigners seeking political asylum; finally, the enlistment of millions of 'guest workers,' beginning in the mid-1950s and increasing massively after the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Many of these foreigners on the labor market changed from highly mobile migrant workers into true immigrants, thus confronting Germany with challenges that recall of the experiences of nineteenth-century German immigrants abroad, nearly forgotten in German collective memory

Enzyklopädie Migration in Europa vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart [2007/2011]

Facing migration and integration many Europeans feel confronted with exceptional challenges today. However, historical migration research shows that these processes have always been central elements of European social and cultural history, and it also reveals that many 'native' insiders who today feel anxious about assimilation or even integration of immigrants are themselves the descendants of foreign outsiders. Apart from some well-known exceptions - e.g. the Huguenots - little is known about the multitude and diversity of groups who have moved across political, social, and cultural borders in modern European history. It is the purpose of the Encyclopedia to illuminate the broad spectrum of these migrations by presenting selected examples. Special significance is attached to permanent immigrations within Europe and from outside regions into Europe. Of particular interest are the resulting intergenerational processes of assimilation lasting for at least two generations. They include many forms of social and cultural composition as well as decomposition, ranging from the gradual disappearance and dissolution of group identities in assimilation processes to minority formations and diaspora situations

Wanderungen im Europa des 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhunderts: Arbeitswanderungen und Unternehmerreisen [2000]

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the intensity, fluctuation, and distance of 'proletarian mass migrations' grew steadily. Apart from permanent immigration into industrial areas and employments, temporary and seasonal mass migrations took place, partly as transitional phenomena. They only partly moved within the traditional migratory systems which on the eve of the age of industrialization became replaced by these new movements, including millions of migrants. Their employment in agrarian production as well as in the service sector added to the rapidly expanding urban areas and industrial agglomerations which, to a large extent, were built by migrant workers, too. Moreover, the large and moving railway, road, bridge, and tunnel construction sites attracted a highly mobile migrant workforce. In addition to the ‘proletarian mass migrations,’ individually migrating experts e.g. from Great Britain functioned as a sort of industrial development workers, like the 'puddlers' in early steel production on the continent. And there were travelling entrepreneurs heading especially to Great Britain, an in-between of education travel and industrial espionage scouting for new machines as well as industrial processes

Wanderungstraditionen und Wanderungssysteme am Ende der Frühen Neuzeit [2002]

Fundamental and incomparable differences in traffic conditions aside, people in late medieval and early modern Europe showed even more mobility than people do in today's world. The majority of people was on the move, for most various motives und purposes, heading to a wide range of destinations nearby or far away. This mobility shaped numerous migration traditions and migration systems. Migration historians Jan and Leo Lucassen identified more than seven long-distance labor migration systems in early modern Europe, with the transnational movement of the 'Hollandgänger' (agrarian labor migrants from western parts of Germany heading to the Netherlands) as one of the most important systems. Within labor migration systems, small business men formed out their own migration systems, spanning the whole of Europe from France in the west to Russia in the east. At the dawn of industrialization, these migration systems came to an end or were transformed by new ones, e.g. the agrarian North Sea system was replaced by the industrial 'Ruhr system,' and while the system of 'Hollandgänger' from the western parts of Germany declined, the new migrant labor system of industrial and agrarian 'Preußengänger' (migrants to Prussia) came to the fore