Book contents
- We Are All Migrants
- We Are All Migrants
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 We Are All Migrants, Almost Everywhere, Almost Always – Especially the Germans
- 1945
- 1989
- 6 Germans There, Russians Here
- 7 Jewish Germaniya
- 8 Welcoming Culture
- Conclusion
- Appendix: Dates and Facts
- Notes
- Index
6 - Germans There, Russians Here
from 1989
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 March 2023
- We Are All Migrants
- We Are All Migrants
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 We Are All Migrants, Almost Everywhere, Almost Always – Especially the Germans
- 1945
- 1989
- 6 Germans There, Russians Here
- 7 Jewish Germaniya
- 8 Welcoming Culture
- Conclusion
- Appendix: Dates and Facts
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Eastern Europe and the USSR had large German minorities. In the USSR this dated back to Catherine the Great, who in 1763 issued a manifesto inviting Germans to settle and colonize land on the Volga in exchange for tax and legal privileges. During Gorbachev’s Perestroika the German minorities began making use of the West German law of return that immediately granted them citizenship as Aussiedler – a consequence of the ethnobiological definition of German nationhood (but why, assimilated, tax-paying, Germanophone second-generation descendants of Turkish labor migrants wondered, should russified descendants of labor migrants to eighteenth-century Russia have easier access to citizenship than they?). Chapter 6 charts the history and lived experience of the 2.3 million Aussiedler who immigrated since 1987 and who have remained largely invisible in public consciousness. The chapter title encapsulates their fraught situation of dual non-belonging: discriminated against in the postwar Soviet Union as “fascists,” they hoped to rejoin fellow Germans when emigrating, yet in reality were excluded as “Russians.”
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- Information
- We Are All MigrantsA History of Multicultural Germany, pp. 138 - 160Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023