Postwar Migration Research Articles

Ethnological Analysis of the Process of the Post-War Migration of Slovaks from Hungary to Czechoslovakia in the Years 1946-1948

ABSTRACT The article focuses on the application of the possibilities of collecting narratives and their analysis in the reconstruction process of migration of people to the new country - in Slovakia. The analysis of the particular data gained by fieldwork research using the oral history method comparative with the historical and statistic dates. These facts offer not only relevant information documenting the real process of the migration, but also create the network of microprobes (case study) on the basis of specific experienced events of the direct participants of migration, as well as the reflection in memory of the resettled. Fieldwork research was in the region of South Slovakia - around Nové Zámky and Komárno cities. The aim of this approach is to interpret individually experience “small history” of the context of “big history”, specifically, one post-war phase of migration, which occurred in this area of Central Europe in the period from 1946 to 1948.

Keys to the City: How Economics, Institutions, Social Interaction, and Politics Shape Development By Michael Storper

Berkeley Planning Journal, Volume 27, 2014 Keys to the City: How Economics, Institutions, Social Interaction, and Politics Shape Development By Michael Storper Princeton University Press, 2013 Reviewed by Aksel Olsen Why do some city regions grow and others decline over time, and what are the defining local differences that make it so? Such complex questions are what motivate Michael Storper, one of the most cited economic geographers, in his new book, Keys to the City: How Economics, Institutions, Social Interaction, and Politics Shape Development. This wide-ranging work is hard to pigeonhole into the disciplinary boxes of fields—geography, economic history, and economics—that typically deal with such questions. Indeed, in Keys to the City, Storper is interested in connections between the different disciplinary optics. Playing Chicken with the Economists Storper begins with a larger, but important, conversation among urban economists about the main drivers of regional growth: When the national map of urban growth changes, is it best explained by migration flows to new regions, with jobs following once this population base is in place, or is it the reverse? Is migration the chicken or the egg, as Muth (1971) seminally asked it? In urban economics, it is commonly assumed that urban systems are in perfect spatial equilibrium (Glaeser and Gottlieb 2009) and that one cannot be made better off by moving to another place—the great amenities of San Francisco, New York, or Denver are perfectly offset by higher costs, traffic, or crime. Thus, people trade off amenities, income and housing costs, and price adjustments in real wages to ensure equilibrium. Consequently, the national system is “stable” and reflects an aggregate of individual preferences (and, of interest to planners, place-based policy is often seen as a counterproductive hindrance to economic efficiency). In this framework, exogenous changes to amenities—like the widespread introduction of air conditioning in the postwar years—can fundamentally change migration patterns and thus the new growth poles of the economy. Migration, in this common view, is the “chicken,” the leading indicator of future growth. Storper argues this framework is not convincing: the postwar migration

Writing a Whole Life: Maria Lewitt's Holocaust/Migration Narratives in ‘Multicultural’ Australia

Many scholars argue today that the memory of the Holocaust has become transnational, travelling to locations and cultures worldwide. This phenomenon has been explored in relation to technological developments, but thus far little scholarly attention has been paid to the interconnection between Holocaust memory and the post-war migration of survivors. In this article, I redress this critical oversight and examine how memory and migration shape the work of Maria Lewitt, a Polish-born Jewish Holocaust survivor who emigrated to Australia. Come Spring (1980) portrays her survival in Europe and No Snow in December (1985) her Australian migrant life; together, the two autobiographical novels recount ‘a whole life’, both over time and synchronically, as Lewitt connects private experiences to global historical events. In the 1980s, a time when Australia was increasingly embracing the diversity arising from its migrant population, the texts inserted Lewitt's personal memories into the public discourse in her new home country. I argue that Lewitt combined her memories of survival and migration in order to add her voice as a Jewish Australian to this new ‘multiculturalism’. This positioning suggests that we require an approach to Holocaust literature that dedicates attention to sociocultural environments. Such an interpretive viewpoint would allow the investigation of transnational movements of memory from individual perspectives, while acknowledging them as bound within certain national contexts and specific memory cultures.

PROCESSES OF COLLECTIVE MEMORY IN CULTURALLY HETEROGENEOUS CITIES ON THE EXAMPLES OF BIAŁYSTOK AND LUBLIN / KOLEKTYVINĖS ATMINTIES PROCESAI KULTŪRIŠKAI HETEROGENIŠKUOSE MIESTUOSE: BALSTOGĖS IR LIUBLINO ATVEJAI

The article presents the results of empirical research concerning the collective memory in Białystok and Lublin – two largest cities in the Eastern Poland. Before World War II they were multi-ethnic cities with big and important communities of Poles, Jews, Germans, Ukrainians and Belarusians. Their contemporary ethnic structure was formed as a result of World War II, in particular the Holocaust, post-war border shifts and intense migration from the countryside to the city in the next decades. Both Białystok and Lublin are an example of the typical cities in Central and Eastern Europe, which after World War II the memory politics was built on in the completely new political and social circumstances. We aim to confront the contemporary official memory of the cities, transmitted by major public institutions and the vernacular memories of their present inhabitants. Straipsnyje pristatomi Balstogės ir Liublino – dviejų didžiausių Rytų Lenkijos miestų kolektyvinės atminties empirinio tyrimo rezultatai. Prieš Antrąjį pasaulinį karą tai buvo daugiaetniniai miestai, turintys dideles ir svarbias lenkų, žydų, vokiečių, ukrainiečių ir baltarusių bendruomenes. Šių miestų šiuolaikinė struktūra susiformavo kaip Antrojo pasaulinio karo, ypač holokausto, sienų persislinkimų pokario metu ir vėlesniais dešimtmečiais vykusios intensyvios migracijos iš kaimo į miestus, rezultatas. Tiek Balstogė, tiek Liublinas yra tipiški Vidurio ir Rytų Europos miestų pavyzdžiai, kurių atminties politika po Antrojo pasaulinio karo buvo kuriama visiškai naujomis politinėmis ir socialinėmis aplinkybėmis. Straipsnyje siekiama palyginti šiuolaikinę oficialią šių miestų atmintį, kurios reguliavimas perduotas pagrindinėms viešosioms institucijoms, ir dabartinių miestų gyventojų vietines atmintis.

World War I on the Eastern Front

Michael Reynolds, Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908-1918. 340 pp. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. ISBN-13 978-0521195539. $98.00. Annemarie H. Sammartino, The Impossible Border: Germany and East, 1914-1922. 248 pp. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. ISBN-13 978-0801448638. $39.95. Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Muge Gocek, and Norman Naimark, eds., A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at End of Ottoman Empire. 464 pp. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN-13 978-0195393743. $34.95. The vast historiography of World War I in Europe can be divided in two. Much better documented is history of Western Front, involving huge armies bogged down in trench warfare; unprecedented carnage that disproportionately eliminated men from upper classes, left millions dead, and transformed human landscape by sending home millions more wounded and disfigured veterans; and a flu pandemic that killed more than half a million people in France and Britain alone. Less studied by historians, Eastern Front was very different. Here war contributed to collapse of empires and set off mass waves of human migration, both forced and voluntary. It also resulted in creation of new nation-states, transformation of 25-30 million people from imperial subjects to national minorities, and genocide. Recent studies of experiences and effects of World War I in East, many of them by historians of Russia, are helping to right this imbalance in historiography. (1) The three books under review here further this work, using new sources, methodologies, and conceptual frameworks to explore how war and imperial collapse transformed lives of people living in German, Ottoman, and Russian imperial lands before, during, and just after World War I. Overlapping in chronology and geography, these three books offer new insights into role of nationalism in wartime conflicts and postwar nation building, causes of ethnic conflict in imperial borderlands, and reasons for genocide. They also offer models for reframing history of these regions in ways that better get at wartime and postwar human mobility, overlapping populations, and imperial entanglements. Of three books, The Impossible Border directly tackles subject of wartime and postwar migrations, specifically various migratory waves moving across Germany's open eastern between 1914 and 1922 (the year that its eastern with Poland was finally set). During this period, millions of Europeans were uprooted from their homes due to war, postwar settlements, and revolution. Germany, Sammartino reminds us in this book, lay at center of these migrations. Between 1914 and 1922, Germany received some one million German citizens from France and Poland, tens of thousands of ethnic Germans and Jews from east, and hundreds of thousands of Russians (2). By focusing on migration--each of book's eight chapters focuses on a particular wave moving into or out of Germany--Sammartino seeks to do two things. First, to put human migrations, and anxieties about Germany's impossible border in east, at center of of sovereignty that Germany experienced in this period; she describes this crisis as a result of collapse of multinational empires and characterized by widespread German anxiety and questioning about relationship among nation, state, and territory (1-5). Her second goal is to interrogate Hannah Arendt's charge, made in The Origins of Totalitarianism, that the failure of postwar states to protect migrants contributed to rise of totalitarianism. (2) Sammartino asks, Does totalitarianism of 1930s have its origins in migration crisis of war and postwar decade? (2). This framing is unsatisfying for three reasons. First, Sammartino does not situate her study within broader debates about continuities between Weimar and Nazi Germany, or historiography of totalitarianism, nor does she explain continued relevance of Arendt's 40-year-old book in pursuing these questions. …

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

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.

Finding Home in White Australia

In 1949 the White Australia Policy was put on trial in the High Court of Australia in the matter O’Keefe v Calwell; popularly known as the ‘O’Keefe Deportation Case’. Drawn from archival research, this article examines the legal arguments that both sides brought to the court. The case raised a number of issues that went far beyond narrow legal and technical arguments. Under what circumstances could a foreign-born non-European individual call Australia home? The answer to this question was seen to hold not only the fate of one Indonesian family but the White Australia Policy and also Australia’s entire postwar migration program.This article has been peer-reviewed.

Research in Transnational Archives: The Forgotten Story of the ‘Australian Immigration Project’

The transformative period in Australian Jewish history was the pre- and post-war migration of Jewish refugees. The Jewish community trebled in size from a tiny community of 23,000 to 61,000. However, whilst the number arriving at the edge of the Diaspora was significant, many more could have benefited. This opportunity was limited because of xenophobic and antisemitic attitudes, which resulted in government quotas and restricted funding. This period signalled the beginning of a partnership between Australian and American Jewry in the enormous task of resettling Jewish Displaced Persons in Australia. A largely forgotten story, it has been preserved in archives in Australia, New York and Jerusalem. This essay draws on this Australian case study to demonstrate the importance of transnational archival research.

The Finnish and Swedish Migration Dynamics and Transnational Social Spaces

This article contributes to debates about the long-term development of migration dynamics. The argument is based on a study of the transnational dynamics of the migration flows between Finland and Sweden. The two countries provide a good case for studying the long-term development of migration patterns, since there has been a full freedom of movement and the migration patterns are well documented. The article argues that the postwar labor migration from Finland to Sweden created a transnational social space that still today facilitates migration between the two countries. Although Finnish citizens dominate the migration flows in both directions, the number of Swedish migrants has steadily increased. This new pattern can be explained by the development of the transnational social space involving an increasing number of mixed families.

Families, Lovers, and Their Letters: Italian Postwar Migration to Canada

Families, Lovers, and Their Letters: Italian Postwar Migration to Canada

Identity Issues in the History of the Postwar Migration from Turkey to Germany

In the last decade, many descendants of immigrants from Turkey have been grappling with new expressions of their belongingness and workable identifiers to express their place within German society. Those searching are often citizens and young professionals who have been born or raised there. Until recently it had been assumed that incorporation though citizenship would be a sufficient basis for becoming Germans. It was also a political belief that to introduce the territorial right (ius soli) to citizenship would be a step toward Germany recognizing itself as a country of immigration. Whether or not this has been the case is addressed in this article. To do this critical events since the initiation of the settlement process and the messages communicated during this period will be examined. A review of these events and messages suggests that tradition, institutions and public discourse continue to articulate an ethnicized view of citzenship that creates barriers to identification with becoming a German. Two prototypes of responses to this situation are analyzed. Finally, there is a discussion of the understanding of citizenship required in this context.

Migration, Transfer and Appropriation

Today foreign restaurants and food shops shape the culinary landscape of Britain. While the impact of post-war migration on the traditional eating habits of the British population has received some attention in historical research, the influence of former waves of immigrants has hardly been studied. This paper focuses on the immigration of German pork butchers and their contribution to the development of meat consumption in Britain. By looking at the pattern of migration it will be shown that migrants created geographically widespread networks in Britain. Within these networks they transferred skills, know-how and social capital. Through a complex process of adaptation and appropriation German sausages were incorporated into the British diet. This process involved natives as well as immigrants. The former had to overcome established food habits while the latter had to adapt their recipes to local taste preferences.

Individualism, Collectivism and Ethnic Identity: Cultural Assumptions in Accounting for Caregiving Behaviour in Britain

Britain is experiencing the ageing of a large number of minority ethnic groups for the first time in its history, due to the post-war migration of people from the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent. Stereotypes about a high level of provision of informal caregiving among minority ethnic groups are common in Britain, as in the US, despite quantitative studies refuting this assumption. This paper reports on a qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with older people from five different ethnic groups about their conceptualisation of their ethnic identity, and their attributions of motivations of caregiving within their own ethnic group and in other groups. It is argued that ethnic identity becomes salient after migration and becoming a part of an ethnic minority group in the new country. Therefore, White British people who have never migrated do not have a great sense of ethnic identity. Further, a strong sense of ethnic identity is linked with identifying with the collective rather than the individual, which explains why the White British participants gave an individualist account of their motivations for informal care, whereas the minority ethnic participants gave a collectivist account of their motivations of care. Crucially, members of all ethnic groups were providing or receiving informal care, so it was the attribution and not the behaviour which differed.

Leadership: Arthur Calwell and the Post‐War Immigration Program*

Arthur Calwell was the major architect of Australia's successful post‐war migration program that laid the demographic, economic and cultural foundations of contemporary society. In public memory, however, Calwell is now mostly associated with the White Australia policy, which aimed to preserve Australia as a white, British‐Australian society by severely restricting Asian immigration. This article assesses Calwell's leadership of the immigration program, his impact and his legacy. It identifies three distinct, often irreconcilable leadership characteristics, defined in terms of him as “innovative policy‐maker’, “political broker” and “agitator”. This focus on leadership challenges the one‐dimensional view of Calwell that exists in Australian political historiography. It is also intended to extend our engagement with leadership studies and illuminate the role leadership plays in political decision‐making, especially sensitive portfolios like immigration.

From Health Check to Muslim Test: The Shifting Politics of Governing Migrant Masculinity

Racialised notions of ‘foreign masculinity’ play a crucial role in migration discourses. This paper argues that such constructs are firmly embedded in political rationalities of migration control. Analysing Austrian post-war migration policies, the paper shows that shifting constructs of ‘foreign masculinity’ were used to legitimate restrictive migration laws. The early ‘guest worker’ regime was mainly interested in questions of bodily health, strength and resilience, as migrant men were primarily seen as work objects. When migration was later reframed as a security threat to the nation and its people, new images of dangerous migrant masculinity arose. Contemporary politics of governing migration and integration construct images of archaic migrant masculinity to define unwanted populations and legitimate differentiated techniques of evaluation, inquiry and exclusion. The analysis leads to a call for critically reflecting the role that the social sciences play in constructing particular notions of migrant masculinity and its entanglements with migration control.

Marketing Tea against a Turning Tide: Coffee and the Tea Council of Australia 1963–1974

Marketing Tea against a Turning Tide: Coffee and the Tea Council of Australia 1963–1974

Polish Postwar Migration to Brazil, 1945-55

Polish Postwar Migration to Brazil, 1945-55

Families, Lovers, and Their Letters: Italian Postwar Migration to Canada by Sonia Cancian (review)

Reviewed by: Families, Lovers, and Their Letters: Italian Postwar Migration to Canada by Sonia Cancian Joseph Pivato Sonia Cancian. Families, Lovers, and Their Letters: Italian Postwar Migration to Canada. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2010. 192 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $34.95 sc. After the Second World War, the largest migration of Italians in history took place not only to Canada and the United States, but to Argentina and other Latin American countries. Many villages in Italy were left as ghost towns well into the 1970s. Sonia Cancian has performed a very important task by analysing 400 private letters, especially three collections that represent communication from both Canada and Italy. The letters are written by immigrants from several towns and cities in Italy: Venice, Spilimbergo (Pordenone), Arcugnano (Vicenza), Rome, Ascoli Piceno and Ripabottoni (Campobasso). Cancian’s study sets out to address two main questions: (1) What do the letters of ordinary people reveal about the effects of translocation on the migrants and their relatives back in Italy? (2) What strategies, and what emotional, social and cultural responses do the letters demonstrate? After an historical review of postwar Italian immigration to Canada and the social contexts for the letter writers, Cancian organizes her study into thematic chapters on kinship ties and networks as means of support and control; gender relations and reproductive roles; the emotional impact of separation; and the role of the love letter. The information that Cancian gathers in answering her main questions makes fascinating reading for both the historian and the general reader. She writes in a clear style accessible to high school and university students. As a social historian, Cancian describes the difficulty in finding and collecting the letters from the postwar period, especially significant groups of letters from both sides of the Atlantic. Her collection of hundreds of letters alone is an achievement. The final section on the love letters of immigration is quite moving and Cancian’s analysis is very helpful in understanding the social context. We learn, for example, that the love letters included unmarried lovers separated by immigration and married couples who may have lived apart for years before being reunited. Despite all of the nostalgia of the many Italian immigrant songs from the 1950s, it is hard to imagine our immigrant parents separated for years. In her introduction, Cancian refers to several historians and seems to subscribe to the New Social History movement. She writes about “advocating the words of ordinary folks to speak for themselves....” (6) and yet she explains that “all the names have been changed to pseudonyms” (xi): “To preserve the confidentiality of the letter writers and the family archivists in possession of the letters, I have changed all the names to pseudonyms. In some cases, I have also changed other identifying information” (151). If the identities of people are changed, are they really speaking for themselves? The author has total control over the process: selecting the letters, translating [End Page 159] the letters, taking only short quotations from the letters, changing information, commenting on the letters, and editing the whole text. Was it also necessary to remove the identity of the real speaker? Does this not take away from the credibility of the study? I suspect that most of the Italian immigrants involved would have been quite happy, even proud, to have their real names used in the letters included in this volume. In the few cases where people wanted to keep confidentiality, those names only could have been changed. She writes that her study “demonstrates the role of the letters in reformulating and sustaining personal identities and relationships that have been disrupted as a result of migration” (7). Many of us would agree with her that the personal identity is important, as many migrants feared that they would be lost or swallowed up in the new world. I would expect that a social historian would be more sensitive to the questions of ethnic minority identity in Canada without being patronizing. Not only should we have the real names of these letter writers, but this volume could have included an appendix with complete letters from several of the immigrants in the book, with the letters in the original...

Love in the Time of Migration

How did a lover’s letter help to negotiate physical absence, separation, and migration? How can words of romantic love and yearning contribute to historians’ understanding of amour-passion, letter-writing, and transnational relationships? And, finally, what do they tell us about ordinary lives and migration experiences? In this article, I argue that love letters written by everyday writers in a context of international migration are extraordinary historical documents. These cultural artefacts offer a plethora of insights on transnational communication, the romantic love that infused such epistolary narratives, the challenges that ordinary lovers faced in their separation, and how letter-writing helped them to negotiate a lover’s absence. Letters written by women and men in the context of Italian postwar migration to Canada are employed to illustrate my points.

Birmingham Stories: Local Histories of Migration and Settlement and the Practice of History

Over the last decade research on the history of ethnic minority migrant communities in Birmingham and the west midlands has grown, with investigations looking at post-war migration and settlement; 'race' thinking and racism; social movements and community activists; faith communities; national identity; issues of surveillance; the local state; public histories and narratives of the city; urban histories and sources; and visual evidence and history. Much of this research has been matched by the presentation of a sustained argument for new narratives of the city's (and by implication the nation's) history which recognises that there is a need for a radical transformation of social memory in order to better reflect the cultural diversity and difference that are a part of everyday lived reality. This article aims to do two things: first to summarise research to date on the ethnic minority history of Birmingham and to locate it within a historiography that goes back to Eric Williams' Capitalism and Slavery (1944); and second to place this historiography within a wider context of historical writing and global and national change.