Imagining Yugoslavs: Migration and the Cold War in Postwar West Germany

Abstract

In recent years historians have argued that after the collapse of the Nazi regime in May 1945, the concept of race became a taboo topic in postwar Germany but that Germans nonetheless continued to perceive resident foreign populations in racialized terms. Important studies of Jewish displaced persons, the black children of American occupation soldiers and German women, and Turkish guest workers have highlighted continuities and transformations in German racial thought from the Nazi era into the postwar world, particularly in West Germany. In a programmatic essay, Rita Chin and Heide Fehrenbach argue that “the question of race remained at the very center of social policy and collective imagination during the occupation years, as the Western Allies worked to democratize Germany, and during the Bonn Republic,” and they call for a new historiography that is more attentive to the category of race and the process of racialization in Germany and Europe after 1945. While this newfound emphasis on race in Germany's postwar history has been salutary, an approach that puts race and racialization at the center of German interactions with resident foreign populations runs the risk of sidelining the experiences of foreign groups that Germans did not view in primarily racial terms. Indeed, to a certain extent this has already occurred. By the mid-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. 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. 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. Only in recent years has the historiography of Germany's postwar migration history started to reflect the multinational character of Germany's immigrant population.