Memory, Politics, and Yugoslav Migrations to Postwar Germany

By Christopher A. Molnar

This historical study “persuasively links the reception of Yugoslav migrants to West Germany’s shifting relationship to the Nazi past . . . essential reading” (Tara Zahra, author of The Great Departure).

During Europe’s 2015 refugee crisis, more than a hundred thousand asylum seekers from the western Balkans sought refuge in Germany. This was nothing new, however. Immigrants from the Balkans have streamed into West Germany in massive numbers since the end of the Second World War. In fact, Yugoslavs became the country’s second largest immigrant group. Yet their impact has received little critical attention until now.

Memory, Politics, and Yugoslav Migrations to Postwar Germany tells the story of how Germans received the many thousands of Yugoslavs who migrated to Germany as political emigres, labor migrants, asylum seekers, and war refugees from 1945 to the mid-1990s. With a particular focus on German policies and attitudes toward immigrants, Christopher Molnar argues that considerations of race played only a marginal role in German attitudes and policies towards Yugoslavs. Rather, the history of Yugoslavs in postwar Germany was most profoundly shaped by the memory of World War II and the shifting Cold War context. Molnar shows how immigration was a central aspect of how Germany negotiated the meaning and legacy of the war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9780253037732

Book preview

Introduction

BRANCO PETROVIĆ, a twenty-five-year-old Muslim from a rural part of Macedonia that he called the poor house of Europe, migrated to West Germany in 1967 to escape the poverty and hopelessness of his homeland.¹ Unlike many Gastarbeiter who migrated to West Germany between 1955 and 1973, Branco was not leaving behind a spouse or children. Nonetheless, his decision to head to Germany was a difficult one. But it was difficult for different reasons than we are accustomed to hearing. His whole family—his brothers, sisters, and especially his mother and father—were completely set against his going. They undoubtedly did not want to be separated from him. But it was more than that. They specifically did not want him going to Germany. His grandmother had always told him that during World War II German soldiers in Yugoslavia were more brutal than the Turkish occupiers of decades past had ever been. His father had spent 1941 and 1942 in a German prisoner-of-war camp. When he was released, he headed to the mountains, where he joined the Partisans and their war against the German occupiers. On a number of occasions, German troops entered the family’s village, demanding that Branco’s mother and grandmother tell them where his father was or else they would all be shot. This was no idle threat, for German counterinsurgency campaigns in Yugoslavia were notable for their extreme brutality.²

The Petrović family survived the war, but bitter memories of the war and German cruelty lived on in the family, as in much of Yugoslavia in the postwar era. Indeed, after he had already been working in Germany for a short time, Branco had what he recalled as the only major conflict he ever had with his father. The Germans, his father angrily told him, first attacked and then for years occupied our land, and they murdered as not even the Turks had done, they exhausted our land and hunted the people, and now our sons must work for them? Where is the difference there? Where is the justice there? Branco strenuously rejected his father’s linking of the war experience with his employment as a guest worker in Germany. He responded that he didn’t care where he made his money. His father ended the dispute with a comment that Branco never understood: You too will understand yet.³

Despite these hard feelings, Branco’s father hailed West Germany’s social democratic chancellor Willy Brandt—who defused Cold War tensions by improving West Germany’s relations with communist Eastern Europe and who forthrightly acknowledged German crimes during World War II—as a true hero.⁴ Branco agreed. He held Brandt in the same high esteem he held Tito and thought that perhaps Brandt would have become a good Partisan if he had had the chance.⁵ Before a Bundestag election, Branco even hung a picture of Brandt on the wall of his living room in Ingolstadt, which his German girlfriend promptly had him take down.⁶

This book tells the story of how Germany received Branco and the hundreds of thousands of others who migrated from Yugoslavia to Germany between 1945 and 1995, sometimes as labor migrants like Branco, but at other times as political émigrés, asylum seekers, and war refugees.⁷ It is particularly focused on German policies and attitudes toward immigrants from Yugoslavia, examining how they shaped immigrants’ experiences and illuminate important transitions in West Germany’s politics and culture.⁸ As Branco’s story suggests, the history of Yugoslavs in postwar Germany was profoundly shaped by the experience and memory of World War II and the shifting Cold War context. This study contends that immigration was one of the ways in which Germans negotiated the meaning and legacy of the war, not just in the first postwar decades, but into the 1990s and beyond. At the same time, the history of Yugoslav migrations to the Federal Republic highlights the salience of the Cold War for understanding Germany’s postwar migration history. The bipolar Cold War world, and Germany and Yugoslavia’s unique positions in that world—Germany divided into two states by the Iron Curtain and Yugoslavia as a nonaligned communist state balancing precariously between the communist East and the capitalist West—structured Yugoslavs’ experiences in Germany and German perceptions of Yugoslavs. This study therefore brings together three subjects of inquiry that have rarely been analyzed together: the memory of World War II, the Cold War, and immigration in Germany’s postwar history.⁹

Europe has a long history of immigration, but the movement of people within and toward the European continent has been one of the defining characteristics of Europe’s postwar era.¹⁰ World War II set Europe in motion; more than fifty million people were forcibly uprooted between 1939 and 1947.¹¹ At the war’s end, Europe’s roads were clogged with people, including millions of displaced persons (DPs) and ethnic German expellees from Eastern Europe. Both these groups were concentrated in Germany, a landscape of ruins that was occupied by the Allied powers and ceased to exist as an independent state. Most DPs would leave Germany as soon as the opportunity presented itself, but as the West German economy took off in the 1950s, people from Europe and throughout the wider world continued to migrate to Germany in massive numbers. Indeed, in the second half of the twentieth century, more people migrated to the western part of Germany than to any other state or region in Europe, most often as labor migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees.¹² Having waged a terrible war and committed genocide in order to create a racially pure German empire, in the postwar period West Germany was transformed into one of the leading countries of immigration in the Western world.

Yugoslavs were the only group of immigrants during this era to come to Germany in significant numbers across the four categories of displaced persons, asylum seekers, labor migrants, and refugees. This book thus engages with more aspects of Germany’s immigration and postwar history than is typical in an academic study. By drawing attention to these different waves of migration and the often blurred borders between them, this book takes a step toward overcoming the sharp historiographical divides that currently characterize the literature on Germany’s postwar immigration history. There are excellent studies of DPs, guest workers, and non-German refugees, but few authors have explored the continuities or ruptures between these different migratory movements and the German response to them.¹³

Yugoslavs have been one of the largest groups of foreign immigrants to arrive in the Federal Republic in the postwar era. In 1969 they became the second-largest immigrant group in Germany, a position they held for the remainder of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. Their population peaked at 1.35 million in 1996, a figure that was still considerably less than the number of Turks in Germany (two million in 1996), but more than twice as large as any other immigrant group by country of origin.¹⁴ Moreover, each of the four groups that are the subject of this study were among the largest groups of immigrants in their respective categories. Individuals from the Yugoslav lands made up a very small portion of the eleven million DPs in Europe at the conclusion of the war, but by early 1952 they constituted, after Poles, the second-largest group of Eastern European DPs still on German soil.¹⁵ Yugoslavs also represented the largest group of asylum seekers from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s, the second-largest group of labor migrants from the early 1970s into the twenty-first century, and the largest group of refugees in the early 1990s (see the appendix for statistics on DPs, guest workers, and Bosnian war refugees).¹⁶ Their story cannot be regarded as just an interesting footnote to the history of immigration in postwar Germany.

Germany and Yugoslavia from World War to Cold War

The history of Yugoslav migrations to Germany, and its meaning for our understanding of Germany’s postwar history, cannot be comprehended unless it is embedded within the broader story of German-Yugoslav entanglements during World War II and the Cold War. By the time World War II broke out in Europe, Yugoslavia, founded in 1918 on the ashes of the defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire, was already in a state of crisis. The multiethnic Yugoslav state, led by the Serbian ruling dynasty, was riven by national conflict from its very inception, primarily between Serbs and Croats, but also by the grievances of Macedonians, Bosnian Muslims, and other minority ethnic groups. In an attempt to overcome these divisions, King Alexander proclaimed a royal dictatorship in 1929. Predictably, this move only intensified national conflict within Yugoslavia. It also led Ante Pavelić to establish the Ustasha movement, a Croatian fascist group dedicated to the destruction of Yugoslavia and the creation of an independent Croatian nation-state. The Ustashas’ most high-profile act during the 1930s was the assassination of King Alexander in 1934.¹⁷ Already facing inner turmoil and a crisis of legitimacy, in 1939 and 1940 the Yugoslav state also faced the specter of the German war machine steamrolling through Europe. Hitler had not initially intended to invade Yugoslavia, but in late March 1941, when he became convinced that Yugoslavia was not sufficiently committed to the Axis powers, he ordered an invasion. It began on April 6, 1941, and ended with Yugoslavia’s unconditional surrender on April 17, 1941. The first Yugoslavia had come to an end.¹⁸

Tony Judt wrote that in the Balkans, World War II was experienced above all as a civil war, and a uniquely murderous one at that.¹⁹ This rings especially true for Yugoslavia, where the German invasion in April 1941 unleashed a bloody civil war with numerous fronts and ever-shifting alliances, and during which more than one million people, most of them civilians, died as a result of the war.²⁰ Germany began carving up Yugoslavia even before the surrender. Germany annexed much of Slovenia; together with Italy established the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), a nominally independent state that included the multiethnic territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina and was ruled by Ante Pavelić and his clerico-fascist Ustasha movement; allowed the annexation or occupation of considerable territories by Italy, Hungary, and Bulgaria; and created a rump Serbian state under General Milan Nedić.²¹ The newly established Serbian regime collaborated with the Germans and participated in wartime atrocities, but it had very little autonomy and Nedić understood his state to be the result of a great national tragedy.²² Ante Pavelić and the leadership of the new Croatian state, in contrast, viewed the creation of the NDH as the realization of the Croatian people’s centuries-old national aspirations.

Once in power, Pavelić and the Ustasha regime almost immediately began the systematic extermination of Jews and Roma. The Ustasha movement considered Serbs, however, to be their greatest enemy. The NDH’s population of about six million included nearly two million Serbs. Shortly after the establishment of the NDH, Mile Budak, minister for Religious Affairs and Education, reportedly declared that one-third of the Serbs would be expelled, one-third converted to Catholicism, and the remaining third liquidated.²³ The Ustasha regime began implementing that plan as soon as it came to power. During the course of the war, the Ustasha killed an estimated three hundred thousand Serbs in the NDH, more than four hundred thousand were expelled or fled, and nearly two hundred fifty thousand converted to Catholicism, often under threat of force.²⁴ Hitler had urged Pavelić to continue to pursue a policy of national intolerance toward the Serbs, but the Ustasha regime carried out these policies with such brutality that even Nazis were appalled.²⁵ In the summer of 1941, Edmund Glaise von Horstenau, the Wehrmacht’s representative to the NDH, complained to his superiors about the blind, bloody fury of the Ustasha, particularly about their utterly inhuman treatment of the Serbs.²⁶ The Ustashas’ violence, corruption, and general inability to establish a functioning state soon led many Serbs, Croats, Bosnian Muslims, and others to join the resistance against the NDH.²⁷

DR. CHRISTOPHER MOLNAR

Font: Myriad Pro

Frame size: 110mm × 115mm

Map of Occupation of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (after the 1941 invasion)

1st Proof 28 july 2017

Occupied and Partitioned...

Occupied and Partitioned Yugoslavia, 1941. © David Cox.

Two major resistance movements emerged in Yugoslavia after the German invasion: the Serbian nationalist Chetniks and the communist Partisans. The Chetniks were a loose band of Serbian guerilla groups who initially opposed the German occupation. But they proved to be more interested in battling the Partisans and cleansing Bosnian Muslim and Croatian areas in Bosnia-Herzegovina, hoping to establish an ethnically pure and authoritarian Greater Serbia once the war ended. Initially having received support from the Allies, by 1944 they openly collaborated with the Nazis in the battle against the Partisans.²⁸ The Partisans were a homegrown communist movement led by Josip Broz Tito. They were committed to the creation of a multinational Yugoslavia in which all national groups would be equals, and they attracted substantial support from Serbs, Croats, Montenegrins, Bosnian Muslims, Slovenes, and other groups.²⁹ They also resisted the German occupation forces much more forcefully and with greater success than did the Chetniks. In September 1941, Hitler responded to these insurgencies by ordering his military leadership in Serbia to reestablish order in the area by the application of the harshest means.³⁰ Just days later, Hitler ordered that throughout German-occupied Europe, Nazi forces were to execute one hundred people for every German soldier or official killed by insurgents and fifty people for each wounded German. This order was strictly enforced only in Serbia, and it resulted in brutal massacres of thousands of civilians who had not been involved in resistance movements.³¹ It was the memory of these massacres that led Branco’s parents and grandparents to lament his decision to leave Yugoslavia in 1967 to become a guest worker in West Germany.

Adolf Hitler greets Ante...

Adolf Hitler greets Ante Pavelić, leader of the Independent State of Croatia, upon his arrival at the Berghof for a state visit. Berchtesgaden, Bavaria, June 9, 1941. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Muzej Revolucije Narodnosti Jugoslavije.

The war in Yugoslavia, exceptionally bloody from the outset, ended in an orgy of violence. With minimal support from the Russians and the Western Allies, the Partisans managed to liberate Yugoslavia from the Germans, while at the same time defeating the Chetniks and the Ustasha regime in Croatia.³² As World War II neared its conclusion in early May 1945, Tito’s Partisans fought their way through northwestern Yugoslavia. With the German army in full retreat, tens of thousands of anticommunist forces, including Chetniks, Ustashas, Slovenian groups, and civilian refugees pushed desperately toward Yugoslavia’s border with Austria, hoping to surrender to the British in order to avoid a final reckoning with Tito’s Partisan army.³³ What exactly transpired next continues to be a source of debate, but the end result is clear. At the Austrian border town of Bleiburg and numerous other locations, Partisans slaughtered upwards of seventy thousand anticommunist forces and civilians, perhaps fifty thousand of them Croats.³⁴ Many Ustasha leaders and sympathizers survived the carnage by melting into the Austrian forest. They soon reemerged throughout the Western world, including West Germany, where they loudly proclaimed themselves innocent victims of communist terror. As we will see, their tales of flight, exile, and suffering at the hands of communists would find sympathetic ears in West Germany.

Ethnic Germans in Yugoslavia, known as Danube Swabians (Donauschwaben) or by the Nazi term Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans), also suffered terribly at the end of the war and in the immediate postwar years.³⁵ Germans had settled on the territory of the modern state of Yugoslavia in numerous movements stretching out over nearly a millennium, and they therefore had deep roots in the region. But because they collaborated with and benefited from the German occupation, they earned the hatred of Tito’s Partisans and the leadership of the new socialist Yugoslavia.³⁶ In November 1944, the leadership of Yugoslavia’s national liberation movement declared Danube Swabians to be hostile aliens who were collectively guilty for Nazi crimes.³⁷ As a result, the ethnic German community in Yugoslavia, numbering just over half a million prior to the war, was almost completely destroyed between 1944 and 1948. They were stripped of all their property; about two hundred thousand fled the country at the end of the war, mostly settling in the Federal Republic and Austria; thousands were rounded up and executed by Partisans; twelve thousand were sent as slave laborers to the Soviet Union; and about one hundred fifty thousand—primarily elderly, women, and young children—were placed in concentration camps, where a staggering one third of them died, largely from mistreatment and appalling sanitary conditions. In 1948 there were only fifty-five thousand ethnic Germans left in Yugoslavia.³⁸ For the two hundred thousand Danube Swabians who had settled in West Germany by the 1950s, their suffering during and after the war led them to conceive of themselves, just like Croats, as innocent victims of communist terror. Their memory of the war resonated in 1950s West Germany.³⁹ This sense of victimhood, combined with the widespread anticommunism of the first postwar decades, led many Danube Swabians, German expellees from other states, and at least some other Germans to be hostile toward Tito’s Yugoslavia and its representatives.

Shifting memories of the war among Germans and Yugoslavs make up half the backdrop against which the history of Yugoslav migration to Germany must be understood. The second half is the Cold War. In June 1948, Stalin expelled Yugoslavia from the Cominform, a move that decisively shaped socialist Yugoslavia’s history. The Tito-Stalin split had many causes, but at root it was a result of Tito’s insistence that Yugoslavia be an independent Soviet ally, not a satellite state.⁴⁰ Cast out of the international communist movement, Yugoslavia became a nonaligned communist state. When Tito turned to the West for support, leaders in the West, and particularly the United States, were happy to oblige, because they viewed Yugoslavia’s break with the Soviet Union as a promising challenge to the Soviet Union’s domination of Eastern Europe. The United States and other Western states sent Yugoslavia billions of dollars of economic aid between the early 1950s and early 1960s, and Tito quickly became the West’s favorite communist.⁴¹

West Germany’s relationship with Yugoslavia started off on a positive note, but things turned sour fairly quickly. The Federal Republic and Yugoslavia established diplomatic relations in 1951, making Yugoslavia the first communist state to recognize West Germany. The Federal Republic took this step for a number of reasons: it saw Yugoslavia as an ally in the Cold War, sought to facilitate the return of German POWs and Danube Swabians, and, perhaps most important, because Tito endorsed the West German position that the two Germanys should be reunified. Yugoslavia’s leaders condemned the ruthlessness and brutality of Soviet terror in East Germany, called for German reunification, and refused to extend diplomatic recognition to the German Democratic Republic (GDR).⁴² But in 1955, two years after Stalin’s death, Tito sought a rapprochement with the Soviet Union. As part of his effort to curry favor with Nikita Khrushchev, Tito extended diplomatic recognition to East Germany in 1957 and thereby recognized and accepted Germany’s division. Yugoslavia thus became the first country outside of the Sino-Soviet Bloc to recognize the GDR. West Germany responded to the affront by immediately breaking off diplomatic relations with Yugoslavia, and relations between the two states wavered between cool and hostile for the next decade.⁴³ West Germany and Yugoslavia would resume diplomatic relations only in 1968, when Tito again moved toward the West, and the Federal Republic, and particularly Foreign Minister Willy Brandt, sought improved relations with Eastern Europe.⁴⁴

For the history of Yugoslav migration to West Germany, the damaged relations came at a critical juncture. The break in diplomatic relations covered the years in which West Germany, facing labor shortages during its economic miracle, signed labor recruitment agreements with most of the states of southern Europe.⁴⁵ Yugoslav workers were in great demand by German employers, but, without the benefit of a labor recruitment treaty, Yugoslav workers were forced to pave their own ways into the country until 1969. These pathways were often illegal and sometimes risky, and they had negative implications for how Yugoslavs were viewed and treated in West Germany.

Yugoslavs in Germany

Four groups of immigrants from Yugoslavia arrived on German territory in the half-century after the end of World War II: political émigrés in the immediate postwar years, asylum seekers in the 1950s and 1960s, labor migrants primarily during the 1960s and early 1970s, and Bosnian war refugees in the 1990s.⁴⁶ Some of these groups overlapped with each other, blurring the distinctions between the groups. This was particularly the case from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, when, for example, it would have been possible for Yugoslavs to leave their country as labor migrants, apply for asylum in West Germany, and then join a political émigré group. While keeping this messiness in mind, it nonetheless can be stated that each group left Yugoslavia for different reasons, had different attitudes toward their homeland, and different socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. Each group was also treated differently by their German hosts. This was in part a result of each group’s different profile and means of entering the country. Political émigrés, in other words, were treated differently from labor migrants, and labor migrants differently from asylum seekers and war refugees. But it was also because these groups settled in Germany during different eras, each shaped in various ways by the shifting Cold War context, the German process of working through the Nazi past, and changes in the broader social, cultural, and political environment.

Immigrants from Yugoslavia entered Germany in four distinct phases. In the first phase, political émigrés, mostly Serbs and Croats, settled in the western occupation zones of Germany immediately after World War II. The émigré community in West Germany was deeply fragmented along national and political lines, but all the leading émigré organizations were fiercely anticommunist and sought the destruction of communist Yugoslavia and the establishment of new states based on the maximalist programs of their respective national groups. Croats, in particular, established vibrant political organizations. They were characterized by significant continuities with the Ustasha movement, in terms of both ideology and membership. By the early 1960s, they would become by far the most radical and violent of all the Eastern European émigré groups in West Germany. Their reception in West Germany was heavily influenced by the conservative sociopolitical environment and especially the pervasive anticommunism of the 1950s and early 1960s.⁴⁷ Despite their radicalism and often compromised pasts, Croatian émigrés found significant sympathy and support in West Germany. This was because many West Germans saw them as allies in the wider Cold War struggle against the communist East and because Croats shrewdly tapped into the widespread West German belief that Germans were the true victims of World War II. But in the early 1960s, when Croats began to carry out acts of violence against representatives of the Yugoslav state on German soil, German support for Croatian émigrés began to wane. By this time, Germans had begun more earnestly working through their own Nazi past, and as a result, they were able to more clearly see the links between Croatian émigrés, the Nazi past, and the horrors of the wartime Ustasha regime.

The second phase, beginning in the mid-1950s and ending in 1968, was characterized by large-scale migration of Yugoslavs to Germany at a time in which West Germany and Yugoslavia had neither diplomatic relations nor a labor recruitment agreement. This meant that Yugoslavs often entered Germany through difficult and time-consuming pathways, some of which were illegal. This was a transitional phase in the history of Yugoslav migration to Germany. It was transitional in the sense that a significant number of immigrants entered Germany as asylum seekers, but most entered as labor migrants, and the proportion of labor migrants to asylum seekers grew steadily throughout the period. During this era, Yugoslavs arrived in a West Germany that was also in transition, gradually moving from the social and political conservatism and anticommunism of the 1950s toward détente and the social and political liberalization of the 1960s. In the conservative sociopolitical order of the 1950s and early 1960s, Germans often feared that Yugoslav laborers were potential communist agents, and German officials deemed Yugoslav asylum seekers to be economic refugees who were attempting to take advantage of German generosity. This led authorities to place significant restrictions on Yugoslavs’ entry into Germany and put them under a cloud of suspicion. But by the early to mid-1960s, most West Germans outside the halls of government no longer saw Yugoslavs or Yugoslavia as a threat.

The third phase, beginning in the late 1960s and ending in late 1973, when West Germany halted its labor recruitment program, consisted almost completely of labor migrants. Their experiences were shaped in important ways by the emergence of a more liberal cultural and political environment in West Germany, and particularly by Willy Brandt’s efforts to defuse Cold War tensions by improving West German relations with communist Eastern Europe. Yugoslav labor migrants shared many of the characteristics of guest workers from other states. They were mostly young men and women who headed to the Federal Republic with the intention of working for two or three years, earning and saving as much as they could, and returning to Yugoslavia to build a house and take part in Yugoslavia’s consumerism-driven good life.⁴⁸ Like other guest workers, they faced discrimination and various disadvantages in their daily lives. By the early 1970s, however, many officials and members of the press came to regard the presence of Yugoslav labor migrants in West Germany as living proof that the long shadow of the war and the Cold War struggle between East and West could be overcome and that communists and capitalists could live together in peace.

During the fourth and final phase of Yugoslav migration to Germany to be examined in this book, Bosnian war refugees, overwhelmingly Muslims, fled to Germany in the early 1990s to escape war and ethnic violence in their homeland. Many Bosnian refugees came from the middle class and were educated and skilled workers. Most hoped to return to their homes in Bosnia, but many could not because Serbs, and to a lesser extent Croats, had ethnically cleansed large portions of their homeland, creating mono-ethnic communities where multicultural communities had long thrived. Germany provided a safe haven to more Bosnian refugees than the rest of the European Union member states combined, but Bosnians entered the country at an inauspicious time. The end of the Cold War and German reunification led to an upsurge of nationalism that soon manifested itself in violent attacks on foreigners, particularly on refugees. Although this violence was rarely directed specifically at Bosnians, it created an environment in which Germans increasingly viewed Bosnian refugees as an unwanted burden. At the same time, some Germans, in a triumphalist reimagining of their own war experience, argued that Bosnian refugees should return home to rebuild their homeland just as German expellees from Eastern Europe had done at the end of World War II. In the end, Germany pursued a policy of deportation and return earlier and more aggressively than any other state in Europe.

Migration in Postwar Germany

Migration has been a fundamental and constant feature of German society in the modern era.⁴⁹ In the twentieth century, in particular, Germany was a profoundly unsettled society in which wars and economic developments led to millions of Germans and foreigners crisscrossing Germany, Europe, and frequently lands beyond, sometimes voluntarily but just as often involuntarily.⁵⁰ Despite the centrality of migration in Germany’s modern history, Germans have tended to see migration as an exception rather than the norm.⁵¹ Indeed, throughout the postwar era, politicians in the Federal Republic repeatedly intoned that Germany is not a land of immigration, a position that stood strikingly at odds with Germany’s demographic reality. Between 1945 and the early 1990s, more than twenty million people, more than half of them Germans, had immigrated to Germany’s western territories. That represents roughly a quarter of Germany’s population at reunification in 1990, but even that high figure obscures the scale of migration in postwar Germany because it does not include the millions of DPs and rotating guest workers who remained only briefly on German territory.⁵²

Historians have long neglected German immigration history, a neglect that both reflected and reinforced the notion that Germany was not a land of immigration. But that has begun to change in recent decades. The first breakthrough came in in the 1980s, when Klaus J. Bade and Ulrich Herbert published pioneering studies that described and analyzed the numerous and highly differentiated waves of migration into Germany during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁵³ These two studies were, in some sense, works of recovery. By documenting the long history of immigration in Germany, they sought to show their German readers that Germany was, and had for a long time been, a land of immigration. Bade’s and Herbert’s works thus directly engaged with the heated political debates surrounding immigration that were taking place in West Germany at the time.

If German politics provided one impulse for historians to examine the history of immigration in Germany, other impulses came from developments within the field of history. The turn away from social-science history and toward postmodern approaches in the discipline of history during the 1980 and 1990s resulted in European historians increasingly studying groups on the margins of society, including ethnic minorities and immigrants.⁵⁴ The transnational turn that began in the 1990s and picked up steam in the first decade of the twenty-first century has likewise led to greater interest in Germany’s immigration history.⁵⁵ The confluence of these historiographical trends and the emergence of immigration as a major political issue in Germany has prompted an outpouring of research on Germany’s immigration history. Much work remains to be done, but we now know much more about immigration in German history—from Polish immigrants in the Kaiserreich to displaced persons after World War II and guest workers in the postwar era—than we did just two decades ago.⁵⁶

People from throughout Europe and the world migrated to West Germany in the second half of the twentieth century, arriving as displaced persons, guest workers, students, and asylum seekers. But in the popular imagination, the great diversity of West Germany’s postwar immigration history has often been obscured by a focus on a single group of immigrants: Turkish guest workers and their families. By the 1980s, public and policy discourse on immigrants in West Germany came to focus overwhelmingly on Turks and the problems raised by their alien Islamic cultural practices. By the 1990s, the words immigrant and Turk came to be nearly synonymous in Germany. That West Germany’s guest worker program had resulted in the permanent settlement of hundreds of thousands of Italians, Greeks, Spaniards, Portuguese, and Yugoslavs was largely forgotten.⁵⁷ There are good reasons for this: Turks have been the largest group of foreigners in Germany since the early 1970s, for many Germans Turks have stood out from other immigrants because of their different religious and cultural practices, and as has already been mentioned, public and political discourse on immigration in Germany has overwhelmingly concentrated on Turks.

This focus on Turks has also exerted an influence on scholars of immigration in Germany. During the 1980s, German social scientists devoted more and more of their attention to Turkish immigrants, to the exclusion of other immigrant groups, a trend that continued into the 1990s.⁵⁸ When historians, anthropologists, and scholars in other disciplines began taking more interest in Germany’s migration history in recent decades, they too focused overwhelmingly on Turks.⁵⁹ In the