Because German historiography long derided 1848 as “das tolle Jahr,” studies of the impact of this crucial period on Prussia's eastern provinces have been relatively scanty. Professional historians, as well as the amateurs and antiquarians who wrote local history, preferred to treat revered and glamorous epochs like the Reformation, the deeds of the most famous Hohenzollern kings, the Wars of Liberation, or the like rather than events which in retrospect were deplored as one of the more shameful episodes of national history. This neglect, to be sure, has been rectified somewhat since the Second World War after the democratization of West Germany and the socialization of the East lent new interest and respectability to the Revolution of 1848. Then too, the loss of much of the old Prussian heartland to Poland has resulted in a number of often valuable studies of this region by Polish scholars who, however, have for understandable reasons tended to focus rather heavily on nationality problems.

In the eighteenth century Germany as a unified, sovereign state was only a vague idea. The Holy Roman Empire provided only a loose framework for more or less independent small states. In an area of 660,000 square kilometers there lived twenty-seven million inhabitants, divided among 310 territories, 50 imperial free cities, and 1,500 imperial knighthoods. Large German provinces such as East Prussia, West Prussia, and Schleswig were situated outside the imperial boundaries. The emperor had no real power. Since 1648 the territories had possessed sovereignty, and looked upon each other as foreign countries. Even a move to a neighboring village lying on the other side of the frontier was considered as emigration.

Up to 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.

Every historian studying the emigration of Europeans to the United States discovers during such research that there was not only a crossing of the Atlantic westward, but a return movement from the United States to Europe as well. In 1842 Charles Dickens in his American Notes wrote about his experiences on a ship traveling from America to England: “We carried in the steerage nearly a hundred passengers: a little world of poverty. … Some of them had been in America but three days, some but three months, and some had gone out in the last voyage of that very ship in which they were now returning home. Others had sold their clothes to raise the passage-money, and had hardly rags to cover them; others had no food, and lived upon the charity of the rest. … They were coming back, even poorer than they went.”