Purging the Empire

The 1871 Constitution of the new German Empire guaranteed that all its citizens enjoyed the law of Freedom of Movement, Freizuegigkeitsgesetz, and, with it, the right of residence. The state, however, in legal terms retained the power to expel non-citizens. With that power, the Empire purged some 32,000 Russian and Austrian Poles, more than 10,000 Danes from northern Schleswig and another approximately 1,000 French citizens from Alsace-Lorraine. Despite the constitutional right of residence, German citizens were also targeted throughout the Empire for expulsion: Jesuits during the Kulturkampf and Social Democrats regularly from particular regions of Germany with the Socialist Law. In the German colonies, German citizens were removed, while in German Southwest Africa entire subject nations were targeted for expulsion. Matthew P. Fitzpatrick’s book carefully examines the reasons for these sporadically occurring mass expulsions, recounts the different ways in which they were enacted and ultimately assesses their place in the history of Imperial Germany. Cases of expulsion, the author posits, offer the opportunity to test the compatibility of, on the one hand, extra-juridical exceptional laws to stabilise and protect the state with, on the other hand, the Rechtsstaat, a state founded on constitutionalism and committed to the rights of citizens as guaranteed by law. Following the political and juridical theorist Carl Schmitt, the author argues that it is precisely legal exceptionality that settles the question of the ultimate locus of sovereignty in the empire

Ancient history · Economic history · Empire · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society