German Emigrants Research Articles

The influence of German emigration on American intellectual life: philosophy and sociology

The influence of German emigration on American intellectual life: philosophy and sociology

International migration and shifts in subjective well-being: A longitudinal study using German panel data

Abstract In many economically advanced countries, a relevant proportion of the population migrates across national boundaries every year. For these individuals, migrating abroad brings benefits (e.g. monetary returns) but also potential pitfalls, as migration is accompanied by profound changes in everyday life. However, there are mainly cross-sectional studies of individuals’ migration experiences that analyse the effects of migration on these individuals’ quality of life. This study fills this gap by examining shifts in the subjective well-being (SWB) of internationally mobile German citizens from a longitudinal perspective using data from the German Emigration and Remigration Panel Study and fixed effects panel regressions. To observe SWB over the course of actual migration events, we drew on a sample of repeat migrants: Germans who returned to Germany shortly before the panel and emigrated again during the panel. Consistent with methodologically comparable studies on internal migration, the analyses show a happiness dip before migration and an increase in SWB with the migration event. The increase is consistent, tends to be more pronounced than that observed in internal migration studies, and to some extent persists after the first few years of migration. Moreover, the results suggest that the increase in SWB systematically depends on the influence that individuals can exert on their migration decisions. Individuals without a partner show the highest increases in SWB, followed by so-called leading partners, partners of couples with a mutual migration decision, and trailing partners.

«Через Мексику в Советский Союз»: немецкие писатели-эмигранты в Мексике в годы Второй мировой войны и их контакты с СССР

The article is devoted to the history of the German writers’ emigration during the Second World War in Mexico. Mexico was not a major center of German emigration like the Soviet Union or the United States, but the Mexican government supported anti-fascist émigrés who were in France before its occupation. The Mexican consulate in Marseille issued visas to many German writers, but only Anna Seghers was able to move from France to Mexico. Bodo Uhse and Ludwig Renn went there from the United States, Alfred Kantorovicz and Hans Marchwitza had to stay in the United States, because transit through the USA became impossible since 1941. German writers maintained constant contact with the Soviet Writers’ Union. Correspondence often did not reach the addressees, but before the establishment of diplomatic relations between the USSR and Mexico, this was the only way to exchange information. The small German colony in Mexico was engaged in active antifascist activities. The movement “Free Germany” (“Freies Deutschland”) was organized in Mexico a year and a half earlier than the National Committee “Free Germany” in the USSR. Although it seemed that they were two branches of the same organization, in fact they were two different entities with different goals and with the same name. At this moment an internal conflict among the German Communists became apparent; years later it had tragic consequences. After the surrender of Germany, German writers were not able to go directly to their homeland, since the American law prohibiting transit through the United States was still in force. In 1946–1948 German writers were leaving Mexico on Soviet cargo ships: they could get to Germany only through the Soviet Union.

От бонапартизма к популизму. Латиноамериканское прочтение «18 брюмера Луи Бонапарта»

The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte was in 1852 a bumpy edi-tion and a circulation limited to German emigrants in the United States, without the slightest direct impact on the events of contempo-rary France. The French public only knew a translation in 1891, when Louis Bonaparte's regime had collapsed two decades earlier. However, the work of Karl Marx became a classic in the first decades of the twen-tieth century, while the notion of Bonapartism transcended its national and epochal context, to become a category of modern political thought thought. With Trotsky's exile in Mexico in 1937, the notion was in-corporated into the Latin American political vocabulary to account for Cardenismo and other national-popular regimes that emerged on this continent throughout the twentieth century. After intensive use, the term fell into disuse in the 1980s, being displaced by a surrogate notion, that of populism, elaborated by the Argentine political scientist Ernesto Laclau.

How do global crises affect privileged migrants? Return migration of German emigrants one year into the Covid-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT This article discusses how global crises affect the return of international migrants. It develops a theoretical model and tests this contribution empirically taking Covid-19 as an instance of a global crisis. Existing studies have treated migration and mobility mostly as phenomena of virus dispersion. The reverse impact of Covid-19 on migration has attracted less attention. This article draws on a unique probability-sample of German emigrants to investigate actual return migration during the first year of Covid-19. These panel survey data were collected immediately before the pandemic onset in winter 2019 and one year later in winter 2020. We enhance these data with publicly available country-level data on Covid-19 incidence, excess mortality and Covid-19-induced democratic violations. Our findings from multi-level regression models suggest a moderate impact of country-specific pandemic indicators on return migration behaviour. Moreover, democratic violations in countries of residence and aggravating economic situations of individual households increase the likelihood of return. We conclude with a discussion of what can be learnt from the case of German return migrants about crisis migration in general.

Career start abroad: The implications of graduate migration for social inequality

Integrating research on school-to-work transitions, international migration, and social inequality, this article investigates the social stratification of international school-to-work transitions and their payoff. Existing research shows that spatial mobility can amplify social inequalities both through social selectivity in access to mobility and through heterogeneity in its labor market outcomes. Building on these findings, we investigate the social selectivity of international school-to-work transitions (ISWT) and the wage difference between ISWT and national school-to-work transitions (NSWT) among graduates from higher education institutions in Germany. Drawing on the German Emigration and Remigration Panel Study and the DZHW Graduate Panel, we account for selection on observables through entropy balancing. Our analysis reveals that graduates from advantaged social origins are more likely to opt for ISWT than graduates from disadvantaged social origins. Furthermore, we find that ISWT are associated with higher wages than NSWT. Notably, the wage benefits of ISWT are relatively higher among graduates from disadvantaged social origins than among graduates from advantaged social origins. Whereas our findings regarding the social selectivity of ISWT are in line with the literature on the reproduction of social inequality through spatial mobility, our findings on the origin-specific returns to ISWT stand out inasmuch graduates from disadvantaged origins benefit relatively more.

International migration and its short‐term effect on partnership stability

International migration and its short‐term effect on partnership stability

Aux origines d’un militantisme transnational ? Bouleversements politiques en Allemagne et réseaux intellectuels entre 1806 et 1849

Sidney Tarrow used the term “Transnational Activism” to deal with a contemporary phenomenon to which he also ascribed historical roots. The aim of the article is to check the relevance of this concept for the intellectual networks that claimed political changes in the German-speaking area in the first half of the 19th century. Did these individuals succeed in combining local and regional interests with a larger European or transatlantic perspective in order to realize cross-border ideas? Or did the transnational approach prove to be an illusion?These questions are examined through three case studies which highlight the specificity of the period between 1806 and 1849: the support for Napoleon’s policy, the striving for a Europe-wide solidarity in the 1830s and 1840s and the political mobilization of German emigrants in the USA during the revolution of 1848/1849.

Enhancing Participation in Probability-Based Online Panels: Two Incentive Experiments and Their Effects on Response and Panel Recruitment

This article investigates how mail-based online panel recruitment can be facilitated through incentives. The analysis relies on two incentive experiments and their effects on panel recruitment, and the intermediate participation in the recruitment survey. The experiments were implemented in the context of the German Emigration and Remigration Panel Study and encompass two samples of randomly sampled persons. Tested incentives include a conditional lottery, conditional monetary incentives, and the combination of unconditional money-in-hand with conditional monetary incentives. For an encompassing evaluation of the link between incentives and panel recruitment, the article further assesses the incentives’ implications for demographic composition and panel recruitment unit costs. Multivariate analysis indicates that low combined incentives (€5/€5) or, where unconditional disbursement is unfeasible, high conditional incentives (€20) are most effective in enhancing panel participation. In terms of demographic bias, low combined incentives (€5/€5) and €10 conditional incentives are the favored options. The budget options from the perspective of panel recruitment include the lottery and the €10 conditional incentive which break-even at net sample sizes of 1000.

Human capital transfer of German‐speaking migrants in eastern Europe, 1780s–1820s

AbstractPrior to the ‘Age of Mass Migration’, Germans left central Europe to settle primarily in modern‐day Hungary, Serbia, Romania, Ukraine, and Russia. Despite the harsh conditions that the first generation of settlers had to endure, their descendants often fared better, rather than worse, compared to native population groups. This study offers a possible explanation for this surprising outcome. It makes use of data on approximately 11 500 individuals to estimate and compare the basic numeracy scores of German settlers and other population groups in target regions. The findings show that German settlers generally had superior basic numeracy levels, which suggests that these settlers must have contributed positively to the human capital endowment in their target regions. The numeracy of Germans was somewhat higher than the numeracy of Hungarians and substantially higher than that of Russians, Ukrainians, and Serbs. No noteworthy differences are found in terms of numeracy between German emigrants and the population they left behind, which suggests the absence of substantial migrant selection.

The transnational life course: an integrated and unified theoretical concept for migration research

ABSTRACT Migration research developed significantly in the past decades. However, with the life course approach and the concept of transnational migration, there are still two different, as yet largely unconnected conceptual perspectives on migration. Both approaches have their merits but also their shortcomings. This paper tries to overcome these shortcomings by combining the advantages of both perspectives to suggest a unified theoretical concept of transnational life courses (TNLC). TNLC builds on the multidimensional understanding of transnational migration research that (potential) migrants live in multiple social and cultural spaces leading to parallel assimilation and dissimilation processes. This perspective is merged with the life course approach with its chronologically ordered understanding of causality relying on preceding determinants and subsequent outcomes in form of events and periods. Based on data provided by the German Emigration and Remigration Panel Study (GERPS) some simple empirical analyses were conducted to illustrate the potential of the TNLC approach.

The Story of Josef Lainck: From German Emigrant to Alien Convict and Deported Criminal to Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Inmate

Josef Lainck, a German national emigrated to Canada in July 1927. He arrived in Quebec City and travelled west to Edmonton, Alberta where he became a burglar and shot a police officer. Lainck was arrested in November 1927 and deported to Germany in 1938, upon arrival he was arrested and interned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp until April 1945. This article will examine Lainck’s emigration to Canada, arrest and deportation to Nazi Germany. Lainck’s case is illuminating as it reveals information on deportations from Canada and the Third Reich’s return migration program and how undesirables were treated within Germany. The Third Reich’s return migration plan encouraged returnees to seek their deportations as a method of return. Canadian extradition procedures cared little for the fate of foreign nationals expatriated to the country of their birth regardless of the form of government or the turmoil that plagued the nation. This work will compare Canadian to American deportation rates as an illustration of Canada’s harsh deportation criterion. In this article, the policies and practices of immigration and deportation are discussed within a framework of insecurity as a key driver for human mobility in the first half of the 20th century.

Love in motion: Migration patterns of internationally mobile couples

AbstractThis paper presents an investigation of the migration pattern of internationally mobile couples using data from the first wave of the German Emigration and Remigration Panel Study (GERPS). GERPS provides information on more than 5,000 couples from which at least one spouse has recently emigrated from Germany or has recently remigrated to Germany. The analyses are theoretically framed by the so‐called trailing wife hypothesis that suggests a clear, gender‐related migration pattern following traditional gender roles. Because most research deals with internal migration, we extend understanding of these topics by investigating international migration. The results of multinomial logistic regressions provide clear evidence for the trailing wife hypothesis but only with regard to couples' timing of emigration. In contrast, women have a higher propensity to become the leading spouse when it comes to remigration. These results contribute to the ongoing debate about tied movers and family‐related inequalities in migration.

Francis Lieber on Institutional Liberty, Secession, and the Modern State

AbstractFrancis Lieber (1800–1872), professor at South Carolina College and Columbia College, New York City, spent his career grappling with the nature of political organization. A German emigre, L...

Refugees Welcome!? The Controversial Topic of Migration in German Museums

Abstract This article deals with the representation of migration in German museums. Three exhibitions are examined, all of which dealt with the topic of migration in the year 2018. The exhibitions included are: “2 Million Years of Migration” presented in the Archaeological Museum Hamburg, “Survival Stories” from A to Z in the House of History Baden-Württemberg in Stuttgart, and “Forum Migration”, shown in the German Emigration Center Bremerhaven. The essay shows that all three exhibitions purposefully participated in the public debate on migration and brought new perspectives and elements into the discussion. However, both the focal points of the exhibitions and the presentation were different. They either concentrated on the fate of migrants who came to Germany in recent years or considered the overall picture of migration and presented it as a core element of human development. Presentations were based on the exhibition of personal belongings of migrants, on hands-on activities or multimedia installations that allowed visitors to get involved.

Self-Selection in Physical and Mental Health Among Older Intra-European Migrants

The Healthy Immigrant Paradox found in the literature by comparing the health of immigrants to that of natives in the host country, may suffer from serious cultural biases. Our study evades such biases by utilizing a destination-origin framework, in which we compare the health of emigrants to that of their compatriots who stay in the country of origin. Isolating cultural effects can best gauge self-selection and host country effects on the health of emigrants with longer time abroad. We study both the physical and mental dimensions of health among European-born emigrants over 50, who originate from seven European countries and now live elsewhere in Europe. We use the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe and apply multi-level modeling. Regarding the physical health we find positive self-selection, beneficial adaptation effects, and effects from other observables for some but not all countries. With the notable exception of the German emigres, we cannot confirm selection in mental health, while additional years abroad have only weak effects. Overall, living abroad has some favorable effects on the health of older emigrants. The economic similarity of countries and the free intra-European mobility mitigate the need for initial self-selection in health and facilitate the migration experience abroad.

GERMAN EXPAT HISTORIANS AND THEIR ROLE IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE AMERICAN HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE NATIONAL-SOCIALISM IN 1940-1960s

The scientific migration from the Nazi Germany to the USA is the subject of close attention by experts who study development of historical science in the USA and, in particular, such a trend as History of Germany. In the USA before the second half of the XX century not much attention was paid to the history of European countries, and a few researches on the history of Great Britain and France are just some isolated examples. Expat historians had changed the situation. The article presents an analysis of political views of German historians who left for the USA after Nazis had come to power. German expat historians are divided into two groups: 1. emigrants of “the first wave” who earned their qualification in History in Germany and worked as instructors at German universities; and 2. emigrants of “the second wave” who were brought to the USA by their parents and obtained education in the host country. Along with the financial support the US government provided the German emigrants with an opportunity to continue their scientific and educational activities. The research activities by German expat historians embraced such a significant topic as the reasons of Nazis’ coming to power. The most important trends of their research are: sustainability of the historical pattern of Germany, the so called ‘extraordinary path’; the reasons for the Weimar Republic collapse; the role of the upper middle class and the army leadership as well as the intellectual elite of Germany in Hitler’s coming to power; the intellectual origin of Nazism; the ideas of ‘the conservative revolution’; the mass culture. Expat historians were the first ones who turned to the issues of ‘Holocaust’. The article reveals the influence of ‘the Cold War’ and the doctrine of totalitarianism on the study of Nazism. The article touches upon the problems of interaction between expat historians and their colleagues in the Federative Republic of Germany and the impact the former made on modernization of the historical science in the West Germany.

The long journey of ‘Privatautonomie’

Summary Individual autonomy was rediscovered in modernity when it came to the persecution of dissenters in Germany after the Reformatio n. Since the 18th century the ‘Privatautonomie’ of the individual has been established in German private law. Later, in the 19th century, the term autonomy gained ground in the legal terminology of French private law, also thanks to the German emigrant Foelix. In the 20th century autonomy, not least thanks to German-speaking jurists who fled from the Nazis, became a legal term also used in the private law of the USA and Great Britain.

The Plight of German Residents of Post-War Poland and Their Identity Issues

AbstractThis article discusses hardships faced by Germans and groups regarded as Germans in postwar Poland stemming from practices of central and local authorities such as expulsions, forced labor, national verification and rehabilitation procedures, de-Germanization, first and last names changes, etc. Collective and individual fates of the German population in Poland are highlighted by political, legal, and social processes occurring in Poland as well as by international politics. Most importantly, the article emphasizes the impact of ambiguous and inconsistent policies of the Polish communist state, which resulted in mass German emigration from Poland and paradoxical identity choices leaning increasingly toward Germanness away from Polishness.

ARTICLE - PHYSICAL EDUCATION, GYMNASTICS, GAMES AND SPORTS IN BRAZIL - THE GERMAN IMPACT

ABSTRACT: This contribution for the dossier Education, health and recreation: historical processes of body education in the Brazilian journal Educação em Revista is based on a long tradition of research in the history of physical education and sport in Germany with respect to the 19th and 20th century. Next to the Swedish model of gymnastics and body education, the German movement of Turnen and gymnastics was very influential and sustainable for the introduction of concepts of systematic body education worldwide. Brazil is one of numerous countries and nations adopting relevant parts of the German body concept of Turnen and gymnastics. There at least two reasons for this process of cultural transfer and transformation. Firstly, the German emigrants who implemented their body experiences including their cultural traditions in their new home countries, and secondly, the elaborate system of didactics and methodic of German gymnastics which were easy to transfer to the educational institutions. This also happened in Brazil.