Migration and crisis in Germany, 1914--1922.

Abstract

This dissertation explores the crisis unleashed in Germany by the Russian Revolution, World War I and the post-war settlements through the lens of migration. Faced with a situation in which boundaries could not be taken for granted---both as they shifted with the tides of war and post-war settlements, and as the post-war migrations made them seem alarmingly permeable---many Germans experienced a crisis in the meaning of national identity, national borders, and the national state. Those involved in migration policy and practice believed that no less than the definition and survival of the German nation was at stake in its treatment of foreigners. Thus, in studying migration during this period, I am also analyzing the attempts by Germans to determine the purpose and composition of the fledgling German republic. I examine both the perceived porousness of national boundaries and the hardening of notions of ethnic distinction. I also analyze the complex and conflicted relationship between ethnic definitions of belonging and ones that emphasized political ideology, such as Bolshevism and anti-Bolshevism. This dissertation is divided into four parts. Part One explores the fraying of the already tenuous German consensus on national belonging turning World War I, in the face of wartime privation and the possibility of German territorial aggrandizement. Part Two examines two groups---the paramilitary Freikorps and the Socialist organization Ansiedlung Ost---that attempted to escape a weakened Germany in the first years after the defeat. In Part Three, I turn towards German efforts to patrol its physical and ideological frontiers against the incursion of foreign elements onto German soil, exploring anti-Bolshevism, border control, and the ideological work of border maintenance involved in determining citizenship policy. Part Four analyzes German responses to Russian Germans, Eastern European Jews and ethnic Russians, paying particular attention to the role that ideologies of tolerance played alongside ethnic nationalism.