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BARBARA MARSHALL, The New Germany and Migration in Europe,
Europe in Change (Manchester and New York: Manchester University
Press, 2000), xii + 186 pp. ISBN 0 7190 4335 2 (Hardback)
£45.00. ISBN 0 7190 4336 0 (Paperback) £14.99
The �ederal Republic of Germany has been a country of immigration
from the start, although this was officially denied until the change of
government in 1998. Anyone who suggests something different has
closed their eyes to reality, or is playing semantic games. Between
1954 and 2000, close to 31 million people migrated to the �ederal
Republic. Their specific legal status varied: they came as guest workers,
refugees from the GDR, family members seeking reunion, asylum-seekers,
ethnic Germans, workers on seasonal or short-term contracts,
or students. Over the same period, 23 million people left the
country again. On average, over the last forty years the population of
the �ederal Republic of Germany has grown by 200,000 per year as
the result of population movements. �ew other countries in the
world can demonstrate a similar positive balance. The strategies
which the political classes so long used to maintain the official
description of the �ederal Republic as a non-immigration country,
despite this huge influx of people over decades, could provide the
topic for a separate investigation. Even before the foundation of the
two German states, 12 million people who had been expelled from
their settlement areas in central and Eastern Europe entered
Germany, and most of them moved to the Western occupation zones.
Every fifth inhabitant of Bavaria, and every third inhabitant of
Schleswig-Holstein at that time was a German refugee from war. In
contrast to what some romanticizing accounts may suggest, the integration
of the expellees into the �ederal Republic’s post-war society
was by no means conflict-free. On the whole, however, it was successful.
One factor contributing to this was the redistribution of property
between victims of war and expulsion, and those who had been
able to preserve most or all of their property. The state spent more
than DM 110 billion on compensating and integrating the expellees,
who also benefited from the long-lasting economic upturn in the
early years of the �ederal Republic’s existence.
Barbara Marshall begins her investigation by looking back to
those times in order to clarify the continuity and structural significance
of in- and out-migration for the �ederal Republic of Germany.
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