Jannis Panagiotidis. The Unchosen Ones: Diaspora, Nation, and Migration in Israel and Germany.

Abstract

Jannis Panagiotidis’s ambitious comparative study, The Unchosen Ones: Diaspora, Nation, and Migration in Israel and Germany, highlights what was common and what was distinctive in policies of the Federal Republic of Germany and Israel that privileged access to citizenship for certain immigrants belonging to the dominant ethnic or, in the case of Israel, religious group. Panagiotidis focuses especially on rejections of individual applications for treatment as Aussiedler (resettler) or oleh (someone who goes up, to Israel) that forced policy makers and gatekeepers in each country to clarify their priorities. “It was the unchosen ones who defined the chosen ones” (4). Both states justified their privileging of members of the dominant ethnic or religious group on the basis of past and current persecution. During and after the Second World War, ethnic Germans suffered both from popular hatreds created by Nazi rule and official policies of ethnic cleansing, which led to the expulsion of millions of ethnic Germans from their homes in Poland and Czechoslovakia. The West German Basic Law of May 1949, the constitution of the Federal Republic, established the right of expellees and refugees of German Volkszugehörigkeit (belongingness to the German people) to be considered German citizens once they arrived in West Germany. The 1953 law that implemented this clause extended the meaning of the term “expellee” to include all ethnic Germans living in the Soviet Union, Soviet bloc countries, and Yugoslavia even after the end of official expulsions. This continuing access to West German citizenship was “a consequence of the assumption that conditions in the old homeland [of the “expellee”] under foreign and communist rule had become unbearable” (42).