Working for Ukraine: Ukrainian Seasonal Labour in Germany, 1905-1914

Abstract

Between 1905 and 1914, tens of thousands of Ukrainians from East Galicia worked legally as seasonal labourers in Germany each year. This channelling of labour was a reflection of both global trends and local East Galician national and socioeconomic relations. On the communal stage, this movement was a carefully organised operation led by the biggest Ukrainian political party before World War I, the National-Democratic Party (Natsionalno-Demokratychna Partiia, NDP). This article looks at the role of Ukrainian seasonal labour migration to Germany within the Ukrainian nationalist project in Austrian East Galicia. Specifically, it focuses on the information campaign run in the populist-conservative daily newspaper titled Dilo (Deed). Dilo was a primary source of advertisements offering the possibility of seasonal work in Germany. At the centre of this investigation is how this NDP daily reported on the progress of the migration and how it furnished an ideological justification for this shift of the labour force. Of particular interest are both the nationalist-moral and socioeconomic arguments used by Dilo to persuade Ukrainian peasants to go and seek seasonal jobs in Germany. It will be argued that the NDP's drive to send local Ukrainian peasants to Germany as seasonal labourers was presented to them as a way to further the Ukrainian cause, with the campaign itself being seen as a routine extension of nationalist concern and mobilisation. The article thus contributes to the analysis of Ukrainian nationalist economic agitation by drawing attention to the largely unexplored German imperial influence on the shaping of the Ukrainian identity before 1914.