Migration und Politik in der Weimarer Republik

Although the short-lived Weimar Republic has been analysed in great detail, recent scholarship has concentrated on its demise and on the rise of National Socialism. The movement of people across borders appears at first glance as a rather unspectacular chapter in the history of Weimar, unlike its fascinating cultural legacy or its dramatic economic history. Nor do the Weimar years appear especially significant in the longer history of German migration: in the second half of the nineteenth century, millions of German speakers crossed the Atlantic, but in the 1920s numbers were much lower. Migration into Germany also appears to have been negligible after 1918, apart from Eastern European war refugees and political emigrés, as well as the seasonal migration of Polish labourers working on the large Prussian agricultural estates. Whatever the level of migration before 1933, the policies then implemented by the Nazis led to movements of population on a much vaster scale. Jochen Oltmer subtly modifies the place of the Weimar Republic in such a narrative. In his exhaustive survey of migration into Germany, he concentrates on the role of the state: both at national ‘Reich’ level and that of competing Land governments and bureaucracies, especially in Prussia and Bavaria. In the first part he assesses how successive Weimar governments coped with mass immigration by refugees and displaced persons from eastern Europe, including Jews, ethnic Germans from Poland and Alsace-Lorraine, and anti-Bolshevik Russians, following the collapse of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires. Germany, and especially Berlin, emerged as a safe haven for refugees, at a time when the Weimar Republic was rocked by political instability and hyperinflation. Russian emigrés, seen as victims of communism, enjoyed most sympathy; Jewish refugees were offered what Oltmer describes as ‘precarious asylum’ under Weimar, except in Bavaria. Ethnic Germans from the lands ceded to Poland were not much welcomed by Weimar governments since large-scale migration from there would weaken the German case for the return of those territories. Oltmer neglects the changing international context, especially the impact of the severe restrictions on migration to the United States imposed from 1921: no longer could migrants into Germany be seen as in transit for America. The second part of Oltmer's study focuses on agreements between German and Polish governments over the seasonal migration of agrarian labourers, looking back before 1914 as well as forward to the Federal German Republic after the Second World War. The strength of this book lies in the fascinatingly detailed new research that it presents: it will serve as the standard work on migration into Germany between 1918 and 1933 for many years

Ancient history · Archaeology · Demise · Economic history · Geography · German · Immigration · Nazism · Political science · Politics · Population · Refugee · Sociology · Weimar Republic · Demography · European history and politics · European Political History Analysis · German History and Society · History · Law