Preliminary Programme

Compared with other European cities, Berlin is a late comer. For centuries a small peripheral city, industrialization and the rise of Prussia put Berlin on the European map in the middle of the 19th century. Berlin’s growth after 1850 was staggering. By 1900, the city had almost 2 million inhabitants, was the capital of a major European power and a highly developed economic hub. However, although contemporaries compared Berlin with American cities, its share of foreign migrants among the permanent residents remained conspicuously low. It needs to be discussed why this was the case (migration control is the prime suspect) and especially what consequences this relative isolation had for Berlin’s development.

During the First World War the migration controls were relaxed. Thousands of workers from east central Europe worked in Germany’s war-related industries. The breakdown of the large Empires, the rise of new national states, and the 1917 revolution in Russia led to a chain of intense military conflicts in east central Europe. Old borders and migration controls collapsed, severe economic crisis and military conflict displaced hundreds of thousands of people. At the same time, the US introduced quotas discriminating not least against migrants from east central Europe.

By the end of the war, Berlin emerged as a focal point of a massive East West migration. In 1923 350.000 Russians lived in Berlin. Other large groups were Jews and Poles who were joined by countless smaller groups.
The questions to be discussed are:
-Where did the migrants originate and where did they intend go?
- How did which individuals and groups connect in Berlin, and for which ends?
- And how did these migrants, many of whom were in transit, influence the specific Berlin modernity, in other words, how were migration and innovation related?

Berlin’s modernity of the 1920s was often associated with movement and with “America”. The famous art critic Herwarth Walden characterized the Berlin of this period in this way: „Is it not a great city in which Russians live in the west, the Germans in the south and the Italians in the north? A city in which the Germans speak French, the Russians German, the Japanese a broken German, and the Italians English. … Berlin is a microcosm of America. Berlin is timeless motion and timeless life. Perhaps the United States of America has a Berlin. But Berlin lacks a United States of Europe.” This quote leads to the question, whether this “multicultural” Berlin should be analysed as a unique phenomenon of a bygone age or rather as a model and a vision. (Show less)

This paper centers on the complex and interactive social processes brought about by the initiation and maintenance of migratory streams. It analyzes
the mix of migratory processes of the African slave trade, then compares them in principle and through some examples to contemporary and
subsequent migrations in Europe and the Americas.

The principal data are from the records of the transatlantic slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, along with related continental migrations. The associated patterns of slave export and of captive and free migration on the African continent are linked empirically and theoretically. In earlier work the author used migration data and demographic simulation to estimate regional African population size and
structure as influenced by slave trade. The present paper is based on a revised and improved demographic simulation that emphasizes the
interplay of overseas migration of captives with migration of captives on the African continent. In its population projections, the analysis will show how slave exports were sufficient to cause substantial decline in population size and
change in population structure in West and Central Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The basis of comparison is a model of migration that assumes the same variables and parameters for all migrations, but for which the rates of
birth, death, and migration varied significantly among the situations. The lower death rates of European and American migrations made it possible
to support higher rates of migration without causing such severe decline in the home populations. Discussion of these comparisons provides an opportunity to supplement the demographic analysis with attention to the
social and cultural conditions in each migratory system. (Show less)

The paper I want to give will present results of a more encompassing research project in Austria about the relationship between migration to North America and other types of mobility, such as internal migration and short-distance migration across state boundaries, in the period 1850-1914. Migration to North America will be examined within the context of long-standing patterns of regional mobility, population development in the 19th century and the changing socio-economic structure of the Austrian Empire. The focus of my investigation will be provided by the provinces of Bohemia and Moravia (now in the Czech Republic) and Galicia (now in Poland and Ukraine). The project utilised different types of source materials, on the one hand samples from the passenger lists of ships sailing to the United States in 1910, on the other hand population statistics published in Austria-Hungary in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Based on quantitative methods and thematic maps we expect to obtain significant new results.
The term migration was invented in the context of administrative needs of the nation states establishing themselves during the 19th century. Since then migration was and is usually defined as crossing national (or regional) borders of administration units and migration history was dominated by a limited view on one particular nation state. Thus, usually not certain regions but national units were defined as ‘areas of immigration’ or ‘areas of emigration’ and the interest of researchers in state boundaries resulted in a strictly separation of different forms of migration, such as internal migration, transatlantic migration, emigration and immigration. Focussing on the linkages of different types of migration processes will enable us to perceive connections in the changing patterns of migration activities and to win new insights into the motivations of migrants. (Show less)

Domestic and international migrations are major themes in U.S. history. Yet, these processes only gained substantive scholarly attention during the inter-World War years of the 20th century. After a flurry of scholarship before World War II, migration research declined during the cold war years of the 1950s. The U.S. had placed stiff legislative restrictions on international migration during the mid-1920s. Over the next two decades, the number of newcomers dropped precipitously to its lowest level since the 1840s. By the late 20th century, however, a new round of scholarship emerged from the confluence of several social, political, legal, and intellectual forces. These forces included the increasing deindustrialization of the nation’s urban economy, the growth of a new information-based economy, and the mass migration of Latino and Asian immigrants into the country. The transformation of scholarship also reflected the emergence of the black liberation struggle, the new social history movement, and the resurgence of the feminist movement. Together, these latter developments ushered in new class, race, and gendered perspectives on American society and the dynamics of mass population movements.
Past and present migration research overlap in theoretical, methodological, and substantive concerns. Both bodies of scholarship engage several interlocking issues—the forces driving decisions to move from one place to another, the reception migrants receive in their new homes, and migrant responses to the host society, including their own ethnic resident populations. Nonetheless, the two fields—internal and international migration—are insufficiently joined. As a means of helping to bridge these disparate bodies of knowledge, this essay focuses on the experiences of African Americans and immigrants during the industrial era.
Specifically, this essay begins with a review of the literature and concludes with a series of comparative questions. How did scholarship on African Americans and immigrants change from the early 20th century through the onset of the modern civil rights and Black Power movements? How did these bodies of scholarship overlap/diverge over time? I then ask questions about the comparative premigration, transit, and settlement experiences of the different groups. How did pre-migration experiences condition decisions to move? How were the different groups received by the predominantly white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant host society? How were they received by their own U.S. ethnic or nationality based communities? Finally, how did migrants respond to their new homes? None of the groups were monolithic. They were fragmented by significant class, regional, gender, and other considerations. Still, compared to other groups, African Americans experienced the most problematic relationship not only with the predominantly white Anglo Saxon society, but also with diverse waves of immigrants. (Show less)