German Emigration to the United States and Continental Immigration to Germany in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

Upto the end of the nineteenth century Germany was a country of emigrants. Until recently the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century transatlantic migration of more than five million Germans, mostly to North America, has been largely forgotten in contemporary Germany, except by a few historians. That is all the more true for the mass movement of foreign migrant workers into the German labor market in the decades preceding World War I. Of immediate interest in West Germany today is the so-called “guest-worker question” (Gastarbeiterfrage) which is now becoming an immigration issue in contrast to the earlier “foreign-worker question” in pre-World War I Germany. In recent years West Germany witnessed the transition from a country hiring “guest workers” to one possessing a genuine immigrant minority. This ongoing experience has contributed to a new interest in the historical development of transnational migration in both of its manifestations, as emigration and as immigration. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Germany experienced alternating waves of the two forms of transnational mass migration, both of which were dwarfed by the internal migration streams.