Selective memory? How history figures in social sciences research on forced displacement to Germany
In situations of rapid change, society sometimes draws upon history to make sense of the present. So do social scientists. And, like wider society, they do so in selective ways. In my research on how experiences and structures of time shape the settlement of recent refugees in Germany, I am trying to understand how history is mobilised in current social sciences research on responses to the large-scale refugee arrival in 2015 and 2016—in particular, collective memory of previous forms of forced displacement to Germany. The history of so-called flight and expulsion of several millions of ethnic Germans ‘expellees’ from Russia and Eastern Europe after 1945 might be one of these collective memories: it remains alive and controversial in public debates. Other recent periods of large-scale refugee arrival include the resettlement of thousands of Vietnamese ‘boat people’ in the 1980s and hundreds of thousands of Yugoslav refugees in the 1990s.
Nor are the Syrians who arrived in 2015 the first refugees from the Middle East to be displaced to Germany: others include thousands of Algerians fleeing colonial persecution in the 1950s, Palestinian, Lebanese and Iraqi refugees in the 1970s and 80s, and Kurdish, Yazidi and leftist refugees from Turkey after the 1981 coup. Often legally considered as economic immigrants at the time, many of these refugees and their descendants continue to live in Germany, and are increasingly visible in the public sphere, such as through migrant associations, as journalists or in politics. How do these previous episodes of transnational forced migration and historical encounter feature in contemporary social sciences research on refugee reception?
Germans expelled from Eastern Europe in 1945—a group of figures clad in dark, heavy clothers and carrying sacks and cases with their possessions. Source: Bundesarchiv via Wikimedia Commons.
In a review of social sciences literature since 2015, I could identify three different forms of awareness of these former periods of displacement. First, some research seems to pay little or no attention to historical factors that might influence how newly arriving refugees are received by local residents. While many papers do note that the receiving society is not necessarily homogenous, they fail to analyse what this might mean for refugee reception. One example is an article by Francesca Adam and colleagues on the social networks of new refugees in Cologne. They usefully report that their refugee informants considered volunteers of Turkish origin to be important local resources. But they don’t elaborate on this point, potentially disregarding existing local histories of displacement in the respective arrival contexts. As a result, the arrival of refugees in 2015 is somewhat constructed as a unitary, exceptional event in which a homogenous majority society encountered ‘different’ newcomers.
A second small but growing strand of research explores the dynamics of how specific communities of migrants who came to Germany in the past have responded to the arrival of Syrian and other refugees in 2015 and 2016. Some articles have described the responses of the Turkish and Kurdish migrant community in Berlin, or Iranian communities in Hamburg; others have asked why and how Hungarian migrants seek to work or volunteer with refugees. What much of this research points out is that migrant communities navigate the arrival of newcomers with a degree of ambivalence. Some people with a migrant background have responded empathetically, having themselves experienced exclusion and racialisation in the past. Others have worried that the newcomers would threaten their own fragile social status in the German societal context, and that they would not be seen as ‘well-integrated’ or ‘deserving’ any longer.
However, none of this research explicitly analyses whether and how established communities’ responses to newcomers are affected by collective memories and experiences of displacement, in addition to (or as opposed to) their experiences of being treated as foreigners in Germany. Yet all these migrant communities, whether of Turkish/Kurdish, Iranian, or Hungarian origin, include former refugees. Does the fact that someone has been a refugee matter more in their response to newcomers than the fact that they belong to a particular migrant community? Research that ignores these biographical differences within one group also seems to overlook generational differences, ethnic or linguistic diversity within ‘migrant communities’, or whether individuals hold German citizenship or not. Therefore, it may inadvertently reproduce essentialising ethnic boundaries that create exclusionary structures in the first place.
A third strand of literature has started to analyse refugee reception through more local and contextualised case studies. Some research has looked at how the sense of ‘crisis’ triggered by the arrival of refugees in 2015/2016, as well as hesitant or racist responses by some local communities, should be understood within a larger context of state failure that started at least during the previous financial crisis of 2008. Other innovative research connects refugee reception since 2015 to wider critical debates in Germany on how society could move away from an ethnonationalist understanding of collective identity towards more inclusive and diverse forms of belonging, democracy, and distribution of resources and power. This work does not see ‘2015’ as an exceptional instance of migration encountering a homogenous majority society: rather, it puts a spotlight on ongoing struggles over collective boundaries and economic and political resources, which characterise what Naika Foroutan has called the German “Post-Migrant Society”. Nevertheless, much of this work continues to consider these struggles within the specific German national context. There is little attention to how forced displacement has a transnational history, which is deeply connected to longstanding legacies of colonialism and European imperialism, as Gurminder Bhambra reminds us.
A broader and deeper approach might analyse how past events and collective memories elsewhere also shape living in Germany today. There are already some grassroots projects and practices doing exactly that, such as the Refugee Voices Tours project, where refugee guides lead walking tours in Berlin, drawing parallels between Germany’s violent past and Syria’s violent present. In social science research, excluding past forced migrations from present understandings may contribute to reifying fixed boundaries—and that might prevent us imagining what a collective future could look like.
The header image shows a group of refugees (walking away from the camera) arriving by a special Deutsche Bahn train from the Austrian/German border at the station of Cologe/Bonn airport in October 2015. Source: WikiMedia Commons.
