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

Abstract

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.