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The history of German migration policies was a growth industry during the 1990s. The political battles of the present, such as asylum legislation, integration, and citizenship reform, created growing interest in the German historical experience of migration, migration controls and citizenship law. At the time, the only major work to tackle the subject was Klaus Bade's pioneering study of Prussian migration policies before the First World War, recently republished in an updated edition.[1] Initially, interest in German migration policies was guided largely by two leading questions. Histories of citizenship in Germany tended to adopt a long or a comparative perspective, which sought to test the hypothesis that German citizenship law and its implementation in practice reflected a particularly ethnic German conception of nationhood.[2] Histories of migration policy, by contrast, tended to focus on particular episodes in which a German tendency to view migrants primarily with regard to their usefulness, and not as potential immigrants and future citizens, clearly emerged, especially with regards to histories of the German Empire, the First World War, National Socialism, the Second World War and the post-war treatment of Gastarbeiter. The Weimar Republic, in contrast, was usually passed over in a few pages that highlighted the continuity of labor market control.[3] This state of affairs was remarkable because research on other countries highlighted the interwar period as an epoch of massive change in international migration policies. Race and ethnicity loomed larger than they had before, as indicated by the implementation of a quota system and barred zones in the United States. Moreover, with the First World War came the introduction of documentation requirements and the creation of labor-management bureaucracies that facilitated the distinction between citizens and aliens, as well as attempts to match labor supply to labor demand. Gérard Noiriel had even gone so far as to argue, largely with a view to migration and documentation policies, that the practices of Vichy had their roots in republican reforms of the late 1920s and 1930s.[4] Jochen Oltmer's magisterialHabilitationsschrift closes this gap all but completely. Based on a thorough reading of the archival record and contemporary public debate, his book shows that the transition from the politics of the First World War to the politics of National Socialism in the years of a labor shortage was more complicated previously assumed. He also highlights that migration policy was a field in which the Weimar Republic's problems emerged with particular poignancy. Oltmer's account is organized thematically rather than chronologically, though his subjects are arranged in the order in which they emerged as the main foci of internal administrative and public political debate. In the Weimar Republic's early years, these topics concerned ethnic Germans left outside the Empire's post-Versailles borders, prisoners of war and political refugees. In the later years, the position of migrant workers gained more prominence. While publicly committed to aiding fellow Germans, the republic's practice was ambivalent. The arrival of former residents of Alsace--mostly skilled workers in industries where labor was in demand, from a territory unlikely to be re-conquered soon--was welcome, but emigration of ethnic Germans from areas under Polish control was actively discouraged. The official view of these potential emigrants was less positive, their numbers were larger by several orders of magnitude and maintaining a visible German minority outside Germany's eastern borders seemed a good way to bolster the German case for a revision of the Treaty of Versailles. Migrants from Poland who could not prove they had been persecuted could therefore only expect accommodation in forbidding refugee camps in remote locations. As Oltmer's third chapter shows, this attitude also shaped the Weimar Republic's response to ethnic German emigration from Russia, which peaked during the famine years of the 1920s. Individual ethnicity was, therefore, not a dominant factor in the treatment of refugees; aliens of all ethnic backgrounds remained in a precarious position in the Weimar Republic, regardless of whether they were former prisoners of war who had opted to stay, or Jewish refugees from eastern and southeastern Europe who loomed relatively large in public debates or refugees from Soviet Russia. Ethnicity and race also loomed large in debates on the desirability of labor immigration. In general, the attitudes of state governments had more or less come full circle since the days of the empire. Whereas Prussia had been most concerned about the impact of Polish immigrants on national homogeneity before 1914, Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg proved most rigid after 1919. However, the majority of migrant workers were interested in jobs in Prussia, in the industrial areas of the Ruhr and, more prominently, in the agricultural east, which continued to rely on the access to Polish labor markets, particularly for potato planting and harvesting. In theory, the states and the empire had a powerful new tool to control labor migration: the obligatory work permit, issued only if no German applicants could be found for a job. Things were, however, not so simple in practice. Political interest in ethnic homogeneity was equal to interest in increasing the supply of food, a goal that could only be achieved, East Elbian landowners claimed, if Polish seasonal workers remained available to German employers. Immigration was, however, regarded with distaste by the völkisch right, Prussia's conservative bureaucracy and the Social Democrats, who viewed Polish laborers as an obstacle to the long-overdue modernization of rural Prussia through mechanization and unionization. The solution, fixed quotas for migrant laborers set to decline every year, proved unworkable, as rural employers turned to undocumented laborers. Moreover, the German government did its bit to undermine respect for legality in immigration matters. Seeking to reimpose a de facto policy forcing Polish migrants to return home for part of the year to prevent their settlement in Poland, German officials came into conflict with Polish determination to cut the state's ties to long-term emigrants, and were frequently forced to aid migrants in clandestinely crossing the border, before an unequal agreement could be concluded with Poland in 1927 that confirmed the status of Polish workers as second-class migrants excluded from social insurance and subject to a forced return for part of the year. Oltmer's comprehensively documented study does more than simply fill a gap in existing research. He unearths a striking pattern to Weimar policies, which could be found in many other fields of policy and may contribute to explaining why successive Weimar governments had such a difficult time in gaining the population's respect. Public pronouncements frequently contradicted secret or semi-secret policies. Official quotas for foreign workers, for example, were unofficially raised and little attempt was made to sanction employers of undocumented workers. Such actions exposed the Republic to criticism from the right and created a climate in which even more restrictive National Socialist policies could acquire broad popular support. Oltmer's book thus treats a question at the center, not the periphery, of the Weimar years.
Published in good time for the 2014 "Karlsjahr", marking 1200 years since the emperor’s death, Johannes Fried’s latest book is intended to make specialist scholarship on Charlemagne accessible to a broad audience. Judging by the impressive sales figures, it has admirably fulfilled that purpose. That is not however to say that it is an anodyne synthesis of current research. The picture of the Frankish ruler it provides is very much the author’s own, as he himself emphasises, so there is little danger that it might be lost to sight amongst the many other biographies currently available. ...
Jonathan Wagner has written a monograph on a migration movement that was in many ways a peripheral one. From a Canadian perspective, Germans accounted for a relatively minor share of immigrants, compared to former residents of the British Isles, of eastern or southern Europe. Seen from Germany, Canada was one of many destinations for migrants who wished to leave the country and were prepared to travel over long distances, but were, for whatever reason, not attracted by the United States, the destination for the overwhelming majority of transcontinental emigrants. Nevertheless, the movement from Germany to Canada was significant in absolute and often symbolic terms. The way Wagner tells it, the story of German-Canadian migration was a tale of parallel experiences: both Germany and Canada experienced federation and increasing international autonomy from the 1860s; both were ruled by domineering conservative figures presiding over de facto liberalization in the 1870s; both participated in the First World War, and both went through traumatic economic crises in the interwar period. ...
This study explores the development of the concept of administratio between the early Merovingian period and the late ninth century. The author’s thesis is that administration lost its original connotation of authority delegated by and exercised on behalf of the state, and that this signals the loss of an abstract awareness of the commonwealth in the early medieval period. In the fifth century the idea of administratio as public powers derived from a higher authority was still in place, but soon thereafter this conception vanished (p. 2–3). Yet when in 814 Louis the Pious became emperor, the original meaning of administratio seemed to get a revival – or, should one say, a new lease of life? Hardly, for only in Italy and Aquitaine was there any awareness left of public service as an abstract concept (p. 7–37). North of the Alps, those in charge did not understand such abstract concepts referring to "Staatlichkeit", as is shown by the fact that the authority of the Carolingian mayors of the palace was never called administratio, even though, in the original meaning of the word, the mayoral office was a clear case of delegated power (p. 16–18). ...
In 1875, the Liebig Extract of Meat Company began to distribute a series of pictures printed on small (11 x 7 cm), colorful, collectible cardboard cards along with its main product, Fleischextrakt. While not the first to adopt this advertising technique, Liebig quickly became the best-known purveyor of Sammelbilder. ...
Over the last few years the boom in Rathenau-studies has continued. The latest addition to the list is Lothar Gall’s biography, which was published last year. Reading Gall’s biography makes it understandable why Rathenau’s life has remained such a popular subject. As a multi-facetted polyglot and business man, as an active and critical commentator of political events and contemporary trends and as an early victim of violent anti-Semitism, he remains a focus for study and research. ...
In a year of many anniversaries – the death of Charlemagne 814, Council of Constance 1414, Congress of Vienna 1814, the outbreak of World War 1914 – it was appropriate to remember Bouvines 1214 for, as Pierre Monnet and Claudia Zey note in their Introduction (p. 9–15), it marked an important event in Franco-German relations with which all these events are in one way or another bound up. These two authors attach much importance to Georges Duby and his study of the battle, making it clear that the book is not about a single event, but concerned to contextualize and set it in the longue durée, hence the timespan of the title. ...
The volume under review is the result of a conference on historical graffiti held at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich in 2017. The aim of this book is to analyse — for the first time — graffiti from the ancient, medieval and modern periods in their historical and geographical contexts from an interdisciplinary point of view. Following this comparative approach the authors show the tremendous potential of this nascent area of research by investigating epigraphic material that has been neglected and underestimated by scholars for a long time. ...
It is a rare and wonderful thing when a book of 383 pages leaves a reader wanting to read more, much more in fact. That is certainly the case with this intriguing collection of thirteen assorted essays on the Rhine economy from 1815 to the present, organized in six broad topical sections: origins, enterprises, sectors and clusters, infrastructures, transport, and environment. ...