Contenu du sommaire : Allemagne et expériences migratoires depuis 1945

The collective migratory experience is at the heart of this special issue, which deals with the politics of immigrant integration in Germany since 1945. Whereas the dominant legal, social and historiographical conceptions have long isolated migratory flows from each other, for example by limiting the ability to become “German” to specific migrant groups, a global migratory experience has nonetheless developed on the basis of the lived experiences of migrants (regardless of their origin), and of the often reused integration instruments deployed by public policies. Interlinkages between different migration flows, long neglected or even denied, are now an integral part of the current research agenda.

Since the second half of the 20th century, Germany has become a central hub for European and global migration flows, witnessing the immigration and emigration of tens of millions of people. On the one hand, this essay seeks to describe the fundamental traits of the German migratory economy and, on the other hand, to look at how and why historians have analysed this phenomenon. This article shall highlight several particularly significant migratory episodes and illustrate how they have been connected to a number of intense political, scientific and media debates.

In 2015, the German government sought to address its current migration challenges by drawing on its experience during the immediate post-war period. More than 20 million people were in flux at the time: foreigners in the process of emigrating or being repatriated crossed paths with German refugees and expellees flowing in from the East, a process that resulted in the ethnicisation of the German population. While the burden of its Nazi past still weighed heavily and the nascent Cold War affected the management of migration movements, how did German society cope with this challenge, and what policies did the German state and their foreign occupiers put in place to ensure social inclusion? While both sides of Germany initially enacted similar measures, divisions ultimately occurred along ideological and symbolic lines. Depending on whether the experience of forced migration was repressed or recognised, this led to assimilation in East Germany and integration in West Germany.

This article argues that the reception policies concerning the Spätaussiedler constitutes the “missing link” between the policies enacted for German post-war expellees and the current regime of integration. As ethnic Germans, theSpätaussiedler benefitted from integration measures designed for expellees. However, their needs more closely resembled those of “foreign” immigrants. Beginning in the late 1960s, the West German State developed integration programs for this population, at a time when political discourse argued that foreign workers would ultimately return home and hence did not need to integrate. The integration measures developed for these German immigrants thus form an integral part of the genealogy culminating in the current integration regime.

Between the 1950s and the 1970s, the number of foreigners registered in the city of Stuttgart never stopped growing. From 10,000 individuals in 1955, this figure rocketed to almost 100,000 by 1979. This increase did not only completely alter the composition of Stuttgart's population: it also had an impact on how foreign residents were viewed and managed. From circumstantial measures based on the idea of a temporary stay, policies of reception transformed into measures seeking integration at the beginning of the 1970s. This article analyses this transformation and at the same time reveals the importance of taking into consideration the local level in migration studies.

This interview with Holger Kolb focuses on the structure and activities of the Expert Council of German Foundations on Integration and Migration, a private advisory council building connections between migration research and public policies. As part of the modernisation of migration policy, it seeks to help rapidly integrate refugees in Germany, primarily in the economic sphere.

Between 1962 and 1984, slightly more than 2,000 minors from Réunion were transplanted to metropolitan France under the pretext of reducing demographic pressure in this underdeveloped French départment in the Indian Ocean. In 2014, the French State acknowledged its moral responsibility in a resolution commemorating the event. In 2016, a history research committee was asked to investigate the case further. Published in April 2018, the conclusions reached by the committee highlighted the complexity of this issue — one which ultimately challenges how child welfare works in France more broadly.

Despite some initial research conducted by Serge Klarsfeld in 1978, the Jews who died in the Drancy internment camp between 1941 and 1944 have remained unidentified and their graves have yet to be found. Yet at the time, the process leading to their death involved a number of surprisingly normal proceedings by the French police, justice system and administration. Our research, based on hitherto unexploited archives, enables us to establish the identity of these victims and where they were buried. This article sheds new light on the relationship between the French authorities and the Nazi regime; it furthermore highlights the function performed by the Union générale des israélites de France (UGIF): that of burying the Jews who died in the camps.

The article offers a new interpretation of Swiss history following the First World War. It argues that, thanks to the country's preservation of neutrality during the war and its relative internal stability in the following years, the Helvetic Confederation transformed itself during the 1920s into a liberal-conservative bastion in the heart of Europe, by combining a weak State and financial liberalism with growing political conservatism. In comparison to other nations that had participated in the war, this unique evolution wrought a number of deep transformations, especially in the economic sphere. It is therefore only when we contextualize the Swiss case in its broader European perspective that we can understand its development during the 1920s.

This article considers the evolution of Australia's official commemoration of the First World War through the prism of its most ambitious memorial project, designed for the conflict's centennial: the Sir John Monash Centre at Villers-Bretonneux in France. This article historicises the origins of this new interpretation centre, offers an overview of the centre's galleries, and analyses the most distinctive features of Australian commemorative policies during the last twenty years. In doing so, this article demonstrates that the unveiling of the Sir John Monash Centre is the culmination of a process that seeks to showcase a positive image of Australia outside of its borders with a view to stimulating national pride back home – a policy which has been purposefully orchestrated by the Australian government since 1998.