Alle Beiträge von Christoph Rass

“Translations of Migration” – Arbeitstagung 2023 an der University of Washington .

Vom 19. bis zum 21. Oktober 2023 trifft sich die Arbeitsgruppe “Translations of Migration” zu ihrer zweiten internationalen Arbeitstagung, diesmal auf Einladung des Simpson Center for the Humanities an der University of Washington und zu Gast bei Prof. Dr. Anand Yang. Im Fokus stehen erneut kulturelle Kodierungen bzw. die Produktion der Bedeutung von Migration bzw. Migrationsgesellschaften.

Kultur- und Literaturwissenschaftler*innen, Historiker*innen und Vertreter*innen der Ethnic Studies diskutieren die Übersetzung/Translation von Konzepten, die “Migration” repräsentieren zwischen kulturellen Kontexten aber auch zwischen Sprachen, wissenschaftlichen Disziplinen sowie über räumliche und zeitliche Distanzen.

Das Programm des öffentlichen Teils der Tagung am 20. Oktober 2023 findet sich im online Kalender des Simpson Center.

Mit dabei in Seattle sind, unter anderem Julie Weise (University of Oregon, Eugene), Peter Schneck (UOS), Anand Yang (University of Washington, Seattle) und Christoph Rass (UOS), Kirsten Silva Gruesz (University of California, Santa Cruz), Lok Siu (University of California, Berkeley), Catherine S. Ramirez (University of California, Santa Cruz), Fredy González (University of Illinois, Chicago) und Albert Manke (ZIF, Bielefeld University). 

Entstanden ist die internationale und interdisziplinäre Forschungsgruppe 2017 als Projekt der Profillinie Migrationsgesellschaften der Universität Osnabrück. Nach einem ersten Workshop im Jahr 2018 zur Kulturtechnik der Produktion von Migration über die Herstellung personenbezogener Massendaten hat sich der Schwerpunkt der Translationen seit 2019 in Richtung transatlantischer Vernetzungen verschoben, um im Dialog zwischen unterschiedlichen Disziplinen und Wissenschaftsräumen die Produktion der Bedeutung von Migration und Diversität in Gesellschaften zu diskutieren. Im April 2022 haben Julie Weise und Christoph Rass die erste Konferenz in diesem Themenfeld an der University of Oregon organisiert, im Oktober 2023 schließt sich nun die zweite internationale Arbeitstagung in Seattle an, deren Ergebnisse 2024 publiziert werden sollen.

Baumgraffiti – follow up in ‚Der Spiegel‘

Nach dem kürzlich in WDR 5 gesendeten Feature von Markus Harmann und Johannes Heinz über Baumgraffiti aus dem Kontext des Zweiten Weltkrieges, hat auch Der Spiegel unter dem Titel “Vergessene Inschriften im Wald: Wie Spuren an Bäumen vom Zweiten Weltkrieg erzählen“ das Thema aufgegriffen.

Die beiden Autoren berichten in ihrem am 14. April 2023 erschienenen Beitrag über Forschungen und Erkundungen zu Botschaften und Zeichen, die Menschen – oft Kriegsgefangene, Zwangsarbeiter:innen oder Soldaten – in Baumrinde hinterlassen haben. Funde dazu gibt es an vielen Stellen in Europa, besonders dicht allerdings offenbar entlang der deutschen Westgrenze und in Luxemburg – dort jedenfalls gilt das Phänomen als bereits gut dokumentiert.

Angesprochen wird im Beitrag – nicht zuletzt mit Blick auf die Arbeit der Interdisziplinären Arbeitsgruppe Konfliktlandschaften der Universität Osnabrück – auch die Frage, wie sich solche Artefakte dokumentieren und inventarisieren lassen und, wie sich methodisch mit der Deutung und Interpretation der oft rätselhaften Baumzeichnungen umgehen lässt.

Karya Depesche #10

Osnabrück, 14:41 Ortszeit. 14 sind abgefahren, 14 sind wohlbehalten zurück. Gruppe 2 des Prospektionsteams der Interdisziplinären Arbeitsgruppe Konfliktlandschaften steht acht Tage nach der Abreise wieder vor dem Historischen Seminar. Morgen treffen die vier letzten Mitarbeiter der Professur für Neueste Geschichte ein, die mit der Ausrüstung auf dem Landweg zurückkehren und heute in Italien angelandet sind.

Das Prospektionsteam bei der Rückkehr nach Osnabrück (Foto: Jessica Wehner).

Nach verdienter Ruhepause steht in den kommenden Wochen die Auswertung der Befunde an.

Dann beginnt im Projektteam die Arbeit am Ausstellungskonzept: “Tödliche Zwangsarbeit in Karya“, für die unsere Ergebnisse gemeinsam mit den Recherchen und der Zeitzeug:innenarbeit der Kolleg/innen von der Stiftung Denkmal für die Ermordeten Juden Europas, dem Dokumentationszentrum Zwangsarbeit, der Universität Thessaloniki und der weiteren Projektpartnern die wissenschaftliche Grundlage bilden.

Der bemerkenswerten Gruppe junger Studierender und Mitarbeiter:innen der Universität Osnabrück möchte ich als leitender Wissenschaftler der Prospektion und unseres Teilprojekts ein großes, anerkennendes Dankeschön für ihre Arbeit an einem wichtigen und schwierigen Thema unter herausfordernden Bedingungen aussprechen.

(Die Bahnstation Karya auf Google Earth)

Lukas Hennies
Andre Jepsen
David Krull
Timo Zdoupas
Simon Hellbaum
Lea Hortsmann
Don Jansen
Gero Leege
Johannes Pufahl
Björn Pust
Jonathan Roters
Marlene Schurig
Johanna Schweppe
Florian Tegtmeier
Ella Malin Visse
Hannah Wessels
Nele Wichert

3-D und VR in der Geschichtswissenschaft?

Digitale Werkzeuge und ihre Möglichkeiten sind in ihrer Anwendung in Forschung, Lehre oder public history auch in der Geschichtswissenschaft nicht mehr nur auf wenige Spezialist:innen oder ressourcenstarke Institutionen beschränkt. Inzwischen sind Software und Geräte so weit entwickelt und verfügbar gemacht geworden, dass auch in kleineren Projekten entsprechende Anwendungen möglich werden, Arbeitsabläufe beim Einsatz von 3-D Modellen oder Virtual Reality (VR) auch in der Lehre vermittelt werden können und ein breites Nachdenken über die Potentiale und Risiken begonnen hat.

An der Professur für Neueste Geschichte und Historische Migrationsforschung der Universität Osnabrück sind in der Interdisziplinären Arbeitsgruppe Konfliktlandschaften der Einsatz von LiDAR Modellen und die Auswertung digitaler Bodenmodelle, die mit Bodenradar oder Gradiometer erhoben werden, schon seit einiger Zeit Alltag geworden.

Auch 3-D Modelle historischer Artefakte, die durch Laserabtastungen oder photogrammetrisch erstellt werden, gehört in vielen Projekten bereits zum etablierten Handwerkszeug. Gerade im Feld der public history ermöglichen solche Modelle neue Zugänge etwa zur Diskussion von Denkmälern als Teil von Erinnerungskultur. Hinzu kommen einfachere Werkzeuge wie Onlineausstellungen, “Street view”-Touren oder digital begleitete Rundgänge, die mithilfe von smartphones absolviert werden können.

In aktuellen Projekten geht das NGHM-Team einen Schritt weiter und erprobt den Einsatz von Virtual Reality. Ist es mit möglichst einfachen Mitteln möglich, Denkmäler in VR-Umgebungen auszustellen, neu anzuordnen und neu zu kontextualisieren? Lassen sich historische Orte so darstellen und aufbereiten, dass ein Besuch in VR einen wissenschaftlichen und didaktischen Mehrwert erbringt? Kann die Vermittlung entsprechender Kompetenzen ein Studieninhalt werden?

Solche Fragen bearbeiten wir natürlich nicht allein, sondern interdisziplinär gemeinsam mit Kolleg:innen des Instituts für Informatik der Universität Osnabrück. Mit der Arbeitsgruppe Fernerkundung (Prof. Björn Waske, Dr. Thom Jarmer & Marcel Storch) arbeiten wir in einer Reihe von Projekten an digitalen Datenaufnahmen mittels terrestrischen und drohnenbasierten LiDAR-Sensoren sowie auch an der Auswertung fernerkundlicher Daten bis hin zu Sattelitenbildern. VR-Anwendungen, die bald auch geschichtswissenschaftlichen Ideen offen stehen, entwickelt in Osnabrück Prof. Dr. Michael Brinkmeier (Didaktik der Informatik). Überhaupt geht es nicht um technische “Wow”-Effekte, sondern vor allem um ein behutsames Überlegen, welche wissenschaftlichen und didaktischen Möglichkeiten sich durch den Einsatz von 3-D Modellen und VR-Modulen ergeben. Umso wichtiger hierfür ist die Kooperation auch mit der Professur für die Didaktik der Geschichte (Prof*in Lale Yildirim).

Prof. Dr. Michael Brinkmeier (Didaktik der Informatik), Prof. Dr. Christoph Rass (Neueste Geschichte und Historische Migrationsforschung), Prof*in Dr. Lale Yildirim (Didaktik der Geschichte) und Dr. Thom Jarmer (Geoinformatik/Fernerkundung) mit dem terrestrischen Laserscanner bei Aufnahmen im Friedenssaal der Stadt Osnabrück (Foto: Frank Wobig).

Ganz konkret nimmt diese interdisziplinäre Kooperation ganz aktuell bei einer Pilotstudie Gestalt an, in deren Rahmen wir kürzlich ein LiDAR-basiertes 3-D Modell des Osnabrücker Friedenssaals im Rathaus der Stadt erstellen konnten und nun fragen, wie solche Modelle für die Praxis handhabbar gemacht werden können, welche Denk- und Lernprozesse sich entfalten, wenn solche Orte digital neu kontextualisiert oder neu genutzt werden, und schlicht auch, wie der Friedenssaal als ein historischer Ort zwischen Vergangenheit und Geschichtskultur digital erfahrbar gemacht werden kann.

Scanner und Beleuchtung im Einsatz unter Leitung von Marcel Storch (Geoinformatik) und Dr. Sebastian Huhn (NGHM) mit Mirjam Adam und Annika Heyen (Foto: Frank Wobig)

Weiter geht das gemeinsame Nachdenken im Sommersemester 2023, wenn in parallelen Lehrveranstaltungen am Historischen Seminar (Prof. Rass/Prof*in Yildirim) und am Institut für Informatik (Prof. Brinkmeier) in Osnabrück Studierende Denkmäler im öffentlichen Raum in 3-D Modelle überführen, die dann neu angeordnet und kontextualisiert in einer VR-basierten Ausstellung aus neuen Perspektiven diskutierbar gemacht werden.

Maik Hoops, Andre Jepsen und Annika Heyen (NGHM) testen VR-Ausrüstung zur Erkundung virtueller Geschichtsräume (Foto: Jessica Wehner).

Wichtige Fragen sind dabei auch, wie Studierende digitale Kompetenzen erlernen und kritisch evaluieren, wie interdisziplinäre Kooperationen organisiert und etabliert werden, und wann und wie derartige Anwendungen, die von Wissenschaftler:innen entwickelt und nicht kommerziell angeboten werden, etwa auch in den Schulunterricht Einzug halten können.

Its all in the Cards. A revolution in information technology during the 1920s

Index cards and card-file indices have shaped data collection and management in modern societies throughout the 20th century. They turned into a key innovation during the 1920s; massive card-based data engines became omnipresent during the first half of the century and grew into integral parts of data management systems with vastly increased efficiency. The power of card-file systems was used in business and manufacturing to administer populations, raise armies, and organize mass murder, genocide, and the Holocaust.

In Germany, card-based knowledge machines had their breakthrough – in business and administration – during the interwar years. They soon became a most powerful tool to record and track people and things and for data-driven decision-making and process control on a hitherto unseen level.

What happened during the 1920s when the “Kartei” turned into an ubicuos tool of knowledge? Card-file systems did not appear out of the blue, of course. Library catalogs had been around for centuries. Still, they were seen as relatively simple applications even though the more complex “Sachkatalog”, which organized books not by names but by subject classifications, proliferated.

The police had also been thinking about index systems as they modernized the “Erkennungsdienst” (or “police records department”). During the 1920s, police officials in Germany discussed science-based innovations: identification through fingerprints, the introduction of typewriters and photography, and using card-file indices in their everyday work – referring back to the legendary index on Berlin’s inhabitants kept in the police headquarters of the capital which originated in 1836 and boasted 14 million index cards – allegedly –, as Franz Feldhaus pointed out in “Police and Technology” in 1926.

Data-flows in production managed with card-file systems as proposed by Grupp in 1914..

But the main drive to make the index an everyday tool to organize knowledge in practice gained momentum in the business world first. In 1914, Werner Grull argued in his handbook on the organization of production facilities that interlinked card indices should be introduced to all departments to organize information from production to sales, from personnel to advertising.

He also mentioned that a new class of office workers would emerge: the card-file operators, the “Karteiführer” was born, the information management specialist of the pre-digital age, and his boss, the “Karteibeamte” as head of all the indices in the company. In Grull’s mind, the index was a fast and efficient tool for handling a multidimensional organization of data by topic and time, markers, color codes, etc., with the entirety of the indices being a living data double of all processes in a company.

During the last years before the war, many publications, some by academics and some by practitioners, argued for modernization, progress, efficiency, and ultimately success through total datafication. Everything needed to be on an index card, and everyone required indexes, and new index card and index system designs emerged in a steady flow. Handbook articles taught card-file design. A few years later, suppliers offered ready-to-use “Karteimöbel” and custom-designed cards for every conceivable purpose.

The Hinze-System desk with integrated card-file drawers advertised in 1920.

But the innovation faced an uphill battle. W. Porstmann published an essay in “Prometheus. The weekly Journal on progress in the trade, industry and science” in 1920. He railed against the dismissal of index cards as “stacks of paper” and thus their description as the primitive sibling of the book. In his mind, the enormous flexibility and speed of organizing material by cards would be a game changer on many levels. He thought that only the card-file index could match the complexity of modern life and production and keep pace with a world that changed faster and faster. The book and even the” American Journal”-format in bookkeeping were yesterday’s tools to the pionieer of the card-based knowledge machine.

The age of the card-file index had begun. Of course, Mr. Porstmann, of Hinze & Co., was himself in the business of promoting the Hinze card-file system for bookkeeping and an integrated workplace tailored to a multidimensional tool for information management.

But of course, this was hardly new. What publications advocated and what businesses adopted at the time was the translation of Taylor’s system of business organization. The economist Rudolf Seubert delivered one of the more detailed German-language descriptions of how Taylor Manufacturing in Philadelphia used index-file systems in 1920 to his readership.

Add for a card-file system printed in 1919.

But the Germans, of course, would overdo it a bit. As documented in a growing number of handbooks and ready-to-go card-file systems available during the 1920s, their drive for “Karteien” surpassed what Taylor had in mind by far.  

One part of this drive was practical considerations; another was an intellectual debate.

Some authors looked back, like Carl Breuer in 1921, who referred to an early modern “knowledge machine” he compared to the first steam engines and argued that the streamlined and simplified grandchildren of these machines were now unleashing their full potential in the hands of everyone. The same would happen to the new information technology.

Some authors looked ahead, like Professor Friedrich Kuntze from Berlin University, who published his monograph “Technik der geistigen Arbeit” in 1923. He adapted multidimensional business card-file systems, like those discussed above, to academic purposes, arguing that the card-file systems introduced the latest business innovations to practical research in the humanities. As a philosopher, he developed a Dewey classification system combined with a 10-dimensional index card system to organize the entirety of philosophical knowledge.

While these debates and experiments went on in Germany, the state also discovered the card-file system. And not before long, the introduction of the tool to all branches of the administration became the most significant consequence of this modernization drive. At the end of the 1920s citizen registers, foreigner registers, taxpayer registers, and police registers were all converted to card-file based systems. During the Nazi period tracking and policing populations from labor extraction to organizing the German war machine, to creating a “Volksgemeinschaft” and organizing the Holocaust was all based on massive decentralized and centralized card systems at some point. The Nazi Party organized its members based on a complex series of index card systems as early as the 1920s.

The card-file register of NSDAP Members in Germany’s Federal Archives.

Organizations and individuals began to learn how to use this tool enthusiastically during the 1920s, the German state adopted the tool as a backbone of its information management, Nazi Germany based its rule on modern information technology.

When the Allies began to study the structure of German administration during the war, they were shocked by the number of indexes, their dimensions, and the efficiency of datafication combined with the ability of bureaucracies to base almost “real-time” decisions on the use of index card systems.

Many of the index card systems survived 1945. They were continued until they transitioned into digital form in the late 1970s when databases were built like index card systems, and a tool that had dominated large-scale data processing for half a century structured the early stages of the digital age.   


This essay grew out of a broader research project at NGHM focussed on card-file based information storage in Germany from the 1920s to the 1980s based on digital data models of the “Gestapokartei” and the “Ausländermeldekartei” for the city of Osnabrück, both of which have been preserved in the State Archives of Lower Saxony; an earlier version was presented at the workshop “Little tools of knowledge“, organized by Prof. Vera Keller at the University of Oregon in May 2022.

See also:

  • Rass, Christoph, Sebastian Bondzio und Wiebke Wellnitz: Machtkampf. Raumbezogene Strategien von NSDAP und KPD in Osnabrück (1928-1933), in: Osnabrücker Mitteilungen 127 (2022).
  • Rass, Christoph, Henning Borggräfe und Lukas Hennies: GEOINFORMATIONSSYSTEME IN DER HISTORISCHEN FORSCHUNG. Praxisbeispiele aus der Untersuchung von Flucht, Verfolgung und Migration in den 1930er- bis 1950er-Jahren, in: Zeithistorische Forschungen (1/2022), S. 148-169.
  • Rass, Christoph, Sebastian Bondzio: Big Data und die Digitalisierung von Geschichte und Geschichtswissenschaft, in: Jahresbericht der Stiftung Niedersächsische Gedenkstätten 2021, Celle 2022, S. 16-21. 
  • Rass, Christoph, Sebastian Huhn, Sebastian Bonzido u.a.: Die Osnabrücker Ausländermeldekartei 1930-1980. Potenziale als Quelle der Stadt- und Migrationsgeschichte, in: Osnabrücker Mitteilungen (126/2021), S. 137-194.
  • Rass, Christoph, Sebastian Bondzio: Next Stop Big Data? Erfahrungen mit der Digitalisierung von Geschichte und Geschichtswissenschaft, in: Vergangenheit analysieren – Zukunft gestalten, herausgegeben von Paul Thomes und Tobias Dewes (Aachener Studien zur Wirtschafts- Sozial- und Technologiegeschichte Band 20), Aachen 2020.
  • Rass, Christoph, Sebastian Bondzio: Allmächtig, allwissend und allgegenwärtig? Die Osnabrücker Gestapo-Kartei als Massendatenspeicher und Weltmodell, in: Osnabrücker Mitteilungen (124/2019).

 

Crimmigration Cycles: Reflexive approaches to the production of the delinquent other and migration control*

by Christoph Rass

Research on the merger of criminal law and migration law continues to fuel current debates that are both new and old to historians specializing in migration and migration control (de Koster & Reinke 2017; García Hernández 2017; Graebsch 2019; van der Woude et al. 2017; Walburg 2016). Crimmigration can be described as an act of migrating in illegal(ized) settings, and as a research method that focuses on the nexus between criminal law and migration law. As the latter, it highlights linkages between norms and policies installed to sanction behavior deemed as delinquent and the policing of “foreigners” and “migrants”, thus regulating their mobility across space and time.

This essay reflects on migration control and the production of the delinquent other and argues that one can interpret these dynamics over time as cycles of crimmigration. Informed by my research on migration regimes and pejorative ascriptions concomitant with regulating mobility, I will engage with this topic in three steps: I will lay out my theoretical argument, then I will continue with an empirical case study before offering a critical appraisal and some concluding remarks.

[1] How does crimmigration look like through the lens of Migration Regime Analysis (Rass/Wolff 2018)? Migration Regime Analysis aims at understanding how sets of individual and collective actors engage in the negotiation of migration framed by norms, institutions, beliefs, practices, and so forth, interwoven in complex and asymmetrical relations. Our reading of the concept Migration Regime is not one of a consciously constructed mechanism to control migration or a policy that has been planned and implementedstrategically beforehand. We use it as a mode to observe how migration is negotiated in complex scenarios in which no single actor is totally in control. That, for instance, allows us to factor migrant’s agency into this conceptual model rather than reproducing ideas of a top-down execution of policies. The way we see it, some actors that are usually connected to nation-states and their bureaucracies try to regulate migration and build structures accordingly. Other actors, usually migrants and their stakeholders, try to navigate and change such systems, driven mainly by aspirations aiming at some sort of improvement. Migration Regimes evolve in path dependencies that tend to amplify and reproduce dominant choices rather than producing radical change.

What is in a Migration Regime by Christoph Rass & Frank Wolff, 2018.

Nation-states seem to manage the ever-same scenarios regarding migration: the entry of non-nationals into the territory, the terms and conditions of their presence, and their removal if expedient. Through this modus operandi, migrants are constructed as “guestworkers,” “refugees,” “illegal migrants,” etc.. Migration is produced as something “good” or something “bad,” as beneficial or detrimental to the dominant order. At the same time, nation-states have developed structures to regulate deviant behavior and exercise social control. These structures are usually older than institutions in charge of the regulation of migration.

When nation-states began to recognize migration as a phenomenon deserving regulation and started to develop internal and external migration control, they had to choose which of their agents and institutions should be taking responsibility. The police seemed to be a good choice. Specialized administrations and norms targeting migration emerged much later. In German states during the nineteenth century, having the police deal with the regulation of mobility seemed an obvious choice given the broader understanding of policey and the conceptualization of the intruding foreigner as a potential threat. Building on that tradition, criminal law seemed an appropriate place to codify certain aspects concerning the regulation of migration.

We could thus argue that parts of migration law, particularly those parts which do not originate from international relations but from the policing of entry, presence, and removal of “strangers” (‘Fremde’) or “foreigners” (‘Ausländer’) by the nation-state and its agencies,  often grew out of police matters and was codified in criminal law.

Migration Regime analysis would support that, indeed, one could expect one of the more longstanding and stable relationships between regime elements like migration law and criminal law because they are kin from a historical perspective –such as administrations charged with policing criminals and those charged with policing migrants. Path dependencies in Migration Regimes tend to maintain such connections that were probably the historical normal in many places. It is the emancipation of migration law from criminal law – not just as a retreat into specialized laws targeting foreigners or (im)migration but as a form of turning away from regulating migration through criminal law – and this should indeed surprise us. If so, studying the relative position of both spheres longitudinally and comparatively – across time and space – could indicate how societies conceptualize migration and its regulation.

This refers to migration control gravitating around conventional betterment or economically-driven mobility. Refugee law took a different path but ended up with tight links to criminal law as well. This might hot have been written into its DNA from the very beginning. But the culturally embedded drive to use crime control for migration control might have contributed to an eventual merger. A cultural history of ideas or an intellectual history of migration control could help us to address this question.   

[2] In an earlier study, I looked at where deportation laws originated in the German Federation and in the German Empire (Rass 2018). We know about the connection between becoming a public charge and the production of deportability. During the first half of the nineteenth century, practices of local and statewide expulsions of foreigners were common in the German Federation. After the split of 1866/67, the North German Federation codified the main reasons for the expulsion of foreigners in its newly written criminal law, which was based on the Prussian criminal law and became the criminal code of the German Empire after the unification of German states in 1871. This process introduced banning non-nationals from the entire territory (aka “Reich”) for selected felonies but mainly when they became a public charge. Consequences of social distress were classified as felonies to be treated by criminal courts, and, as a result, deportations were applied as a logical consequence of the sentencing. In time, this became part of the German Ausländergesetz (Aliens Act) but the production of deportability in modern Germany based on an actual law has its roots in the inscription of deportation as Reichsverweisung into criminal law.

Reichsverweisungen 1875-1905 @ Christoph Rass, Praktiken der Exklusion, 2018

Was that a new idea in the 1870s? I was recently looking at Justus Möser, an Early Modern thinker of the German enlightenment from Osnabrück who published – among many other topics – on how to regulate migration in the late eighteenth century – an entire century earlier (Rass 2020).

Christoph Rass, Bewegung in einer kleinen Welt, 2020.

Möser argued that landowners constituted the state while all other inhabitants – to him, all immigrants of some sort – were only to be temporarily tolerated no matter how long they had lived in the territory. If they violated a norm or if they became a social burden, the community of landowners should be allowed to summarily sentence them to expulsion as criminals. His point was that this form of policing administered by the community of landowners and their courts would procure a well-disciplined labor force tailored to the needs of the elites. Justus Möser came up with a model migration policy that predated what would later be written into the criminal code of the German Empire and haunted us well into the post-1945 era. We could probably trace the underlying ideas even further back and find that merging migration control and criminal law is – in fact – deeply embedded in German, European or Western culture.

[3] A critical appraisal of crimmigration begins with this question: Why should we limit the study of mergers between different spheres of law in forming migration policies at the intersection of the criminal code and migration law? The control of migrants seems to be drawing input from almost every part of the ever-differentiating body of modern law, whether centralized in a body of foreigner law or decentralized across different branches.

For example, the production of unfree labor and discriminatory labor market positions of migrants makes use of the law across several fields. An obvious case is the links between labor law, migration law, and criminal law in Canadian temporary work programs during the 1980s, to name one prominent example (Rass 2014). As is often the case in temporary work programs, state-regulated controls of working conditions were suspended, the power to initiate deportation by reporting norm violations was handed to employers, and permanent residence became dependent on a migrant’s clean record and on the ability to stay with one employer for a minimum period. Understanding such systems requires turning from scrutinizing bilateral links – between migration law and criminal law or between migration law and labor law – to analyzing triple or multilateral mergers (Rass 2010).

This brief essay yields three observations:

[1] Using migration regimes as a historically informed analytical framework helps us to understand long-standing connections between criminal law and migration law produced by path dependencies. A growing distance between both of these areas of law should rather surprise us than their merger. Their relative position and the characteristics of their entangledness – as they change over time – are worth studying from a longitudinal and a comparative perspective.

[2] Tracing back ideas of how criminal law and its institutions and the policing of foreigners were conceptualized not only by practitioners, police officers, jurists, and lawmakers but also by intellectuals, philosophers, and academics can broaden our perspective on how crimmigration became culturally embedded and normalized.

[3] Connections between different areas of law in migration control go beyond crimmigration and become more critical as other sections of law differentiate and grow apart. The production of migration, migration control, and its place in the body of law – tending to disguise its sometimes highly discriminatory and abusive character – might strongly depend on such connections, which needs to be pointed out by critical and reflexive migration research.


References:

Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, César: What is Crimmigration Law?, in: Insights on Law and Society,  17. 2017, H. 3, 22 – 25.

De Koster,Margo/Herbert Reinke: Migration as Crime, Migration and Crime, in: Crime, History & Societies, 21. 2017, H. 2, S. 63 – 76.

Graebsch, Christine M.: Krimmigration. Die Verwobenheit strafrechtlicher mit migrationsrechtlicher Kontrolle unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Pre-Crime-Rechts für „Gefährder“, in: Kriminologie. Das Online-Journal, 1. 2019, H. 1, S. 75 – 103.

Rass, Christoph: Institutionalisierungsprozesse auf einem internationalen Arbeitsmarkt. Bilaterale Wanderungsverträge in Europa zwischen 1919 und 1974 (Studien zur Historischen Migrationsforschung), Paderborn: Brill  2010.

Rass, Christoph: Unfreie Arbeit und globale Mobilität vom 19. ins 21. Jahrhundert, in: Arbeit und Recht seit 1800. Historisch und vergleichend, europäisch und global, Köln:  Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2014, S. 229 – 257.

Rass, Christoph: Praktiken der Exklusion. Die Reichsverweisung im Migrationsregime des Deutschen Kaiserreichs 1871/75-1914/18, in: IMIS-Beiträge, 52. 2018, S. 97 – 138.

Rass, Christoph: Bewegung in einer kleinen Welt. Justus Möser als Denker eines frühneuzeitlichen Migrationsregimes, in: Winzer, Ulrich/Tauss, Susanne (Hrsg.): Es hat also jede Sache ihren Gesichtspunct …’. Neue Blicke auf Justus Möser, Münster: Waxmann 2020, S. 85 – 100.

Rass, Christoph/Wolff, Frank: What Is in a Migration Regime? Genealogical Approach and Methodological Proposal Migrationsregime, in: Pott, Andreas/ Rass, Christoph/ Wolff, Frank (Hrsg.): What is a Migration Regime?, Wiesbaden: Springer 2018, S. 19 – 64.

Van der Woude, Maartje, Barker, Vanessa,  van der Leun, Joanne: Crimmigration in Europe, in: European Journal of Criminology, 14. 2017, H. 1, S. 3 – 6.

Walburg, Christian: „Crimmigration“. Die Ausweisung als Mittel der Migrations- und Kriminalitätskontrolle, in: Neue Kriminalpolitik, 28. 2016, H. 4, S. 378 – 88.

*This essay originates form a talk given at the conference: CRIMMIGRATION. ON THE MERGER OF CRIME CONTROL AND MIGRATION CONTROL @ ZIF, February 2021

Der “Gastarbeiter”-Reflex

Ein weiteres Mal erweist sich die Zukunft der Migration als unberechenbar, haben scheinbar sichere Prognosen und darauf gegründete politische Entscheidungen eine überraschend geringe Halbwertzeit.

In den vergangenen Jahren und ganz aktuell haben die Folgen gewaltinduzierter Migration die Schwerpunkte von Migrationspolitik in Deutschland und Europa in Richtung eines Managements von Displacement, Flucht und daraus folgender gesellschaftlicher Diversität bewegt. Ganz aktuell zeigen auf brutale Art und Weise ein Krieg in Europa und die Fluchtbewegung aus der Ukraine, wie trügerisch Annahmen über Frieden, Sicherheit und die Kalkulierbarkeit von Zukunft sein können – mit gravierenden Auswirkungen auch auf das Migrationsgeschehen und unsere Vorstellungen über die Zukunft unserer (Migrations)Gesellschaft.

Die Regulierung von Fluchtwanderung hat die Versicherheitlichung von Migration als Terrorabwehr zu überlagern begonnen. Arbeitsmigration bzw. Einwanderung als Politikziel in Deutschland ist trotz des “Fachkräfteeinwanderungsgesetzes” des Jahres 2020 und eines wachsend intensiven Diskurses über Fachkräftemangel praktisch in den Hintergrund gerückt. Mit der Covid-19 Pandemie hat die Kontrolle von Mobilität – auch innerhalb des Schengen-Raums – eine neue Qualität gewonnen.

“Bundesregierung holt Gastarbeiter”,
Bild (26. Juni 2022)

Und nun? Europa und die Welt befinden sich in einer multidimensionalen ökologischen, ökonomischen und politischen Krise. Und entgegen den Erwartungen vieler, kehrt zwischen demographischen Trends, aktuellen Verwerfungen auf Arbeitsmärkten, dem Abreißen arbeitsmarktrelevanter Migrationsbewegungen und dem aggregierten Effekt sozialer Mobilität vieler Arbeitenehmer/innen der Arbeitskräftemangel zurück. Nicht zuletzt die Pandemie hat auch offenbar werden lassen, wie sehr besonders unattraktiv verfasste Bereiche unseres Arbeitsmarktes von unmittelbar Migration abhängen.

Nicht nur in den USA, auch in Deutschland ist inzwischen von einer “Arbeiter(/innen)losigkeit” die Rede. Und im Sommer 2022 bemerken nicht nur Menschen in Pflegeheimen und Krankenhäusern die Auswirkungen, sondern auch Urlauber/innen an deutschen Flughäfen.

Die Antwort lautet im Juni 2022: temporäre, staatlich regulierte Arbeitsmigration. Unerwartet, ungeplant und ad hoc organisiert. Tausende Fachkräfte aus der Türkei sollen an deutschen Flughäfen Personalknappheit während der Reisesaison ausgleichen. Während allerdings Politiker/innen in diesem Zusammenhang eben von “temporärer Arbeitsmigration” sprechen, löst die Situation in Teilen der Medien den “Gastarbeiter”-Reflex aus. Migrant/innen, die es auf sich nehmen, auf transnationalen Arbeitsmärkten mobil zu sein, haben besseres verdient, als diese Vokabel und kurzfristig gedachte Migrationspolitik.

Aus Max Webers Wortschöpfung “Gastarbeiter” ist auf ihrem Weg durch die Propaganda das Zwangsarbeitsregimes des “Dritten Reiches” über die umgangssprachliche Bezeichnung für die Arbeitsmigrant/innen der westdeutschen “Wirtschaftswunder”-Jahre längst durch die Translation “guest worker” eine internationale Kategorie geworden. “Guest worker program” fasst staatlich regulierte Programme zur Anwerbung ausländischer Arbeitskräfte in temporären Rahmungen. “Guest worker” lädt diese Politiken aber auch mit bestimmten Bedeutungen und Erwartungen auf. Dies mit inzwischen quasi globaler Reichweite aber regelmäßig unter erschreckender Abwesenheit kritischer Reflexion des Begriffs, seiner Geschichte und seiner Implikationen als quasi amtliche, umgangssprachliche und sogar wissenschaftliche Bezeichnung.

“Gastarbeiter” verschleiert sprachlich die mit der Präsenz auf transnationalen Arbeitsmärkten verbundene Migration. Das Konzept suggeriert – und das schon seit mehr als einem Jahrhundert -, dass als “Gastarbeiter” markierte Menschen eben keine Migrant/innen seien, die sich auch für eine Niederlassung am Arbeitsort entscheiden können. Der Begriff evoziert Erwartungen an Systeme temporärer Arbeitsmigration, die hermetisch eben nicht die eine unerwünschte und nicht intendierte Niederlassung und also Einwanderung eines Teils derjenigen Migrant/innen hervorbringen, deren Mobilität durch Politiken temporärer Anwerbung von Arbeitskräften gerahmt wird. Die Verschränktheit von temporärer Arbeitswanderung und Niederlassungsmigration ist aber – historisch robust geprüft – eine erwartbare Normalität in Migrationsgesellschaften.

Die Illusion und Empathielosigkeit solchermaßen kontrollierbarer menschlicher Mobilität, die nichts weiter produzieren soll als disponible Arbeitskräfte – in potentiell ausbeuterischen Rahmungen -, hat Mal um Mal dazu beigetragen, dass Gesellschaften, die glaubten, “Gastarbeiter”-Systeme zu betreiben, sich nur sehr unzureichend für die aus temporärer Migration nahezu sicher erwachsenden Niederlassung bzw. Einwanderung und das damit verbundene Wachstum migrationsinduzierter Diversität geöffnet haben.

In Deutschland und in der Welt wird “Gastarbeiter” noch immer gelesen als Bezeichnung für mobile Arbeitskräfte ohne Zugehörigkeitsoption, die zeitweilig zur Verrichtung niederer Arbeiten geduldet werden – von Saison zu Saison oder während guter Konjunkturen, schlecht bezahlt und gesellschaftlich marginalisiert. Denn als “Gastarbeiter” gelabelte Menschen sind mitten in unserer Gesellschaft, werden aber als nicht-zugehörig gedacht.

Jeder Rekurs auf die Idee “Gastarbeit” verkürzt migrationspolitisch und im gesellschaftlichen Diskurs die Komplexität und Kontingenz menschlicher Mobilität. Er entlastet mittels so geweckter Zukunftserwartungen Gesellschaften vordergründig davon, sich mit den Realitäten einer Migrationsgesellschaft auseinanderzusetzen.

In erster Linie ist das Wort “Gastarbeiter”, das inzwischen als Teil westdeutscher Erinnerungskultur eine bisweilen fast sentimentale Aufladung erfährt, stets und vor allem eine diskriminierende und reduktionistische sowie ausschließende Bezeichnung für Migrant/innen (gewesen), denen über Jahrzehnte und eigentlich über Generationen die Zugehörigkeit zur deutschen Gesellschaft durch ihre Klassifikation verweigert wurde.

Es ist Zeit, sich bei der Aushandlung unserer Migrationsgesellschaft vom “Gastarbeiter”-Reflex zu emanzipieren und Geschichte sowie Wirkung dieses Unworts der Migrationspolitik reflexiv ernst zu nehmen.

Maly Trostenez digital erinnern | Erste Ausstellungen online

Mit der gemeinsamen (online) Präsentation erster Projektergebnisse sind am 10. Mai 2022 die Ausstellungen des Projekts Maly Trostenez digital erinnern online gegangen.

Die digitalen Ausstellungen und Rundgänge sind nun unter der URL

https://malyjtrostenez.nghm-uos.de/ aufrufbar.

Seit 2021 haben sich Studierende aus Minsk, Wien und Osnabrück in einem von der Stiftung Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft geförderten Projekt des Programms Jugend erinnert multiperspektivisch und multimedial mit dem Vernichtungsort Malyj Trostenez/Maly Trascjanec auseinandergesetzt und gemeinsam sechs digitale Ausstellungen und mehrsprachige digitale Rundgänge entwickelt.

Ziele der gemeinsamen Arbeit waren (1) Beiträge zur historischen Kontextualisierung des Vernichtungsortes Malyj Trostenez/Maly Trascjanec, (2) die Konzeptionalisierung und Erprobung digitaler Lösungen mit Hilfe frei oder sehr kostengünstig verfügbarer und für Studierende und Schüler/innen selbständig handhabbare Plattformen und Apps sowie (3) die gemeinsame und selbst bestimmte Entwicklung von Zugängen und Perspektiven zur Vermittlung der Geschichte des Zweiten Weltkrieges und der Shoah, der deutschen Besatzungsherrschaft und des Vernichtungskrieges in einer transnationalen Gruppe.

Aliaksandr Dalhouski und Studierende erproben die DigiWalk Rundgänge in Minsk

Erste Projektergebnisse stehen nun öffentlich über das digitale Ausstellungssystem OMEKA und die App DigiWalk zur Verfügung. In den kommenden Wochen ergänzen weitere Sprachversionen, multimediale Inhalte und weitere Zugänge das Material.

Das Projekt hat unter Leitung von Dr. Aliaksandr Dalhouski, Geschichtswerkstatt Minsk, Prof*in Dr. Kerstin von Lingen, Prof*in Claudia Theune sowie Prof. Dr. Christoph Rass Studierende der Universität Wien, der Belarussischen staatlichen pädagogischen Universität sowie der Universität Osnabrück zusammen geführt.

Projektabschluss und -fortsetzung: Den Vernichtungsort Maly Trascjanec (MALYJ TROSTENEZ) digital vermitteln.

Einladung zur Vorstellung der Ergebnisse des Projekts
Digitale Erschließung des Vernichtungsortes Malyj Trostenez
am 10. Mai 2022 um 17 Uhr MEZ |LINK|

Bei Maly Trascjanec nahe Minsk liegt die wohl größte Vernichtungsstätte des Holocaust auf dem Gebiet der vormaligen Sowjetunion. Zwischen 1942 und 1944 ermordeten die deutschen Besatzer und ihre Helfershelfer auf der Waldlichtung Blahaǔščyna, im Lager “Malyj Trostenez” und in dem angrenzenden Waldstück Šaškoǔka viele Tausende Jüdinnen und Juden, zivile Geiseln, Insass/innen der Minsker Gefängnisse, darunter Untergrundkämpfer, Partisanen- und Widerstandsverdächtige sowie erkrankte Häftlinge.

Gedenkanlage bei den Massengräbern von Blahaǔščyna.

Obgleich sich Maly Trascjanec seit dem Ende der Sowjetunion zu einem gesamteuropäischen Gedenkort entwickelt hat, bleibt die Erinnerungslandschaft des Schauplatzes stark von der sowjetischen Gedenkkultur geprägt. Zugleich verankert sich trotz zahlreiche Initiativen in Deutschland und Österreich sowie auch einer großen internationalen Wanderausstellung der Vernichtungsort Malyj Trostenez/ Maly Trascjanec nur langsam im kollektiven Gedächtnis beider Länder.

Gefördert von der Stiftung “Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft” haben sich seit Januar 2021 Studierende aus Belarus, Österreich und Deutschland im Rahmen des Programms “Jugend erinnert” mit der transnationalen digitalen Erschließung und Kontextualisierung des Vernichtungsortes Malyj Trostenez/ Maly Trascjanec auseinander gesetzt.

Das Ergebnis ist eine multiperspektivische Sammlung digitaler Ausstellungen, die von den Studierenden gemeinsam mit Dr. Aliaksandr Dalhouski (Geschichtswerkstatt Minsk), Prof’in Dr. Claudia Theune & Prof*in Dr. Kerstin von Lingen (beide Universität Wien) sowie Prof. Dr. Christoph Rass (Universität Osnabrück) erarbeitet haben.

Ein Digiwalk im Überblick

Die Ergebnisse dieses internationalen Projekts zur digitalen Erschließung des Vernichtungsortes Malyj Trostenez/ Maly Trascjanec stellt die Arbeitsgruppe nun im Rahmen einer digitalen Veranstaltung vor.

Am 10. Mai 2022 ab 17 Uhr (MEZ) findet dazu ein Webinar statt, zu dem wir alle Interessierten sehr herzlich einladen möchten.

Unter diesem LINK ist der Zugang zur Veranstaltung möglich.

Rückfragen im Vorfeld sind an die Projektleitungen in Belarus, Österreich und Deutschland möglich, zB via Email bei Prof. Dr. Christoph Rass.

Mit dem Projektabschluss verbindet sich in der bereits langjährigen Kooperation zwischen der Geschichtswerkstatt Minsk und der Professur für Neueste Geschichte und Historische Migrationsforschung der Universität Osnabrück der Start in die nächste Etappe gemeinsamer Aufarbeitung der Verbrechen von Shoah, Besatzungsherrschaft und Vernichtungskrieg in Belarus.

Erneut in Förderung durch die Stiftung “Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft” beginnt unmittelbar und in Kooperation mit Prof*in Dr. Lale Yildirim (Didaktik der Geschichte, Universität Osnabrück) das Anschlussvorhaben Virtueller Lernort Malyj Trostenez/ Maly Trascjanec .

Es versteht sich als didaktische Erweiterung der multiperspektivischen digitalen Erschließung und erarbeitet einen universell einsetzbaren Workshop für die historische Bildungsarbeit und den Geschichtsunterricht in deutscher und belarusischer Sprache, der die digitalen Ausstellungen und Rundgänge zu Malyj Trostenez/ Maly Trascjanec adressiert.

“Gastarbeiter”. Weitere Fundstücke zur Geschichte eines Unworts

Gastarbeiter” – die Wortschöpfung Max Webers – bleibt bis in die Gegenwart, nicht nur in Deutschland, sondern auch in viele Sprachen übersetzt, oft wenig reflektierte historische Kategorie zur Beschreibung von Menschen, die im Rahmen regulierter Anwerbeprogramme zu Migrant/innen wurden. Zugleich fungiert der Begriff nach wie vor als terminus technicus ebensolcher Migrationspolitiken – weltweit.

Dazwischen sorgt die ständige Wiederholung des Begriffs in medialen Diskursen oder auch Produkten der public history, nicht selten ohne kritische Dekonstruktion, für die Reproduktion der ihm innewohnenden Bedeutungen. Diese transportieren, wie jüngst Maria Alexopoulou herausgearbeitet hat, rassistische Wissensbestände aus der Geschichte in die Zukunft.

Die fortschreitende Digitalisierung von Quellenbeständen erlaubt es, an einer wachsenden Zahl von Fundstellen immer dichter belegt aufzuzeigen, wie und in welchen Kontexten der Begriff “Gastarbeiter” einen Weg von seiner Erfindung zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts bis in die Gegenwart gefunden hat.

Das Deutsche Zeitungsportal offenbart dazu nun ein neues Fundstück: Einen weiteren Artikel aus der deutschen Exilpublikation “Die Zeitung. Londoner deutsches Wochenblatt”, erschienen am 16. Februar 1945.

Unter der Überschrift “Der neue Trumpf” heißt es dort:

Knapp vor Torschluss versuchen die Nazis, sich noch in gutes Licht zu setzen. Ihre Propaganda betont neuerdings die enormen Leistungen der nazistischen Organisationen und vor allem der NSDAP […] Besondere Aufmerksamkeit wird den ausländischen Zwangsarbeitern gewidmet. Sie werden jetzt “Gastarbeiter” genannt und bei der Tagung der Beauftragten für die Lagerbetreuung in der Steiermark wurde auf die grossen Verbesserungen hingewiesen, die “trotz der sehr schweren Umstände” gerade in letzter Zeit durchgeführt wurden. Daher könne “die Feindagitation nirgends etwas ausrichten” und würden die Gäste später “als Propagandisten für die soziale Ordnung und den Arbeitsfrieden in ihre Heimat zurückkehren”.

Die Quelle verdeutlicht ein weiteres Mal die Art und Weise, in der die NS-Propaganda Aspekte der Verwendung und Ausdeutung der Kategorie nach 1945 vorweggenommen hat, und damit auch Pfadabhängigkeiten von Bedeutungsproduktion und Humankategorisierung die von der NS-Zeit in die Bundesrepublik Deutschland weisen.

Translations of Migration

The Translations of Migration-group started as a cooperation between Julie Weise (History Department@UO), Christoph Rass, and Peter Schneck (both IMIS@UOS) within the framework of the Migrationsgesellschaften research profile at Osnabrück Universtiy.

This collaboration expanded into an international and interdisciplinary network of scholars convening an series of online Tiny Desk Conferences between 2020 and 2022 exploring different modes in which ideas and concepts representing „migration“ are translated as they move between cultural spheres, languages, academic disciplines and across time and space.

From April 27th to 29th the TM-Group will meet in person for the first time to hold the Translations of Migration conference at the University of Oregon, Eugene.

Over three days, scholars will present on the application of translation as an analytical tool to better understand how concepts related to migration are culturally coded, and how meanings change as they move. Talks will discuss actors and practices of translation as well as the productions of meaning and knowledge from diverse interdisciplinary and methodological angles.

Catherine Ramirez , U.C. Santa Cruz, will give the conference keynote „Assimilation: Global Idea or just an American Thing?“ on April 27th, followed by a panel discussion between her, Fredy Gonzales, University of Illinois-Chicago, and Christoph Rass, Osnabrück University.

The conference will bring together scholars from cultural studies, literatur studies, history and anthropology joined by commentators from the fields of geography, languages & literatures and comparative literature.

Sessions on April 27th and 28th are open to the public. The event marks the transition from ‚on-line‘ to ‚in-person‘ and will not be streamed; a conference report will be published.


Translations of Migration Conference

University of Oregon, Eugene

An international conference of historians and cultural studies scholars exploring the many ways that migration and mobility have been translated across time and space, languages, cultures and academic disciplines.

Conference Schedule

Wednesday, April 27

Welcome

Gumwood Room, EMU
9:00-9:30am

Dennis Galvan, VP for International Affairs 
Vera Keller, History Department Head 
Julie Weise, Associate Professor of History 

Panel #1: Translations of Everyday Life

9:30-11:00am

“The Things They Carried: Representational Functions of Migrant Artifacts,” Kirsten Silva Gruesz, U.C. Santa Cruz 

“Migrant-Speak: Keywords in Bihari Lives in the ‘East’ and Beyond in the Nineteenth Century,” Anand Yang, University of Washington

“Chifas: Translating Chineseness through Food,” Lok Siu, U.C. Berkeley

Confirmed commentator: Roy Chan Panel

#2: Translations of Migrant Imaginations

11:30am-1:00pm

“Edwidge Danticat’s Committed Writing as a Translation of Migration,” Laura Bieger, University of Groningen, the Netherlands

“Child Migrant Stories: Walk on Water and The Walk,” Catherine S. Ramirez, U.C. Santa Cruz

“Labor Migrant Film Audiences in the Post-World War II Years,” Julie Weise, UO

Confirmed commentator: Michael Allan

Public Keynote

Gerlinger Lounge, Gerlinger Hall
4:00-5:30pm

“Assimilation: Global Idea or Just an American Thing?”  

Catherine Sue Ramirez, U.C. Santa Cruz 
​​​Fredy Gonzalez, University of Illinois-Chicago
Christoph Rass, University of Osnabrueck 

Thursday, April 28

Panel #3: Translations of Belonging

Lease Crutcher Lewis, EMU
9:30-11:00am

“The Tong Wars in Mexico: New Perspectives,” Fredy González, University of Illinois-Chicago

“‘Assimilating’ ‘Gastarbeiter’? A Reflexive Approach to the Translation of Concepts in Migration Studies,” Christoph Rass, University of Osnabrueck 

“Lost and Found in Translation: Re-Figuring the Figure of the Migrant,” Peter Schneck, University of Osnabrueck (via Zoom)  

Commentator: Xiaobo Su

Wissenschaftler:innen als Akteure gesellschaftlicher Neuaushandlungen in der Zwischenkriegszeit.

Studierende und Absolvent:innen des Historischen Seminars, Abteilung Neueste Geschichte und Historische Migrationsforschung, berichten aus Ihren Arbeiten.

NGHM, der Blog der Professur für Neueste Geschichte und Historische Migrationsforschung der Universität Osnabrück, ist auch ein Forum für Beiträge aus studentischen Arbeiten . Die Ergebnisse von Abschlussarbeiten, aus Seminaren oder Ausstellungsprojekten veröffentlichen wir in loser Folge und bieten damit unseren Studierenden die Gelegenheit, mit ihren Texten sichtbar zu werden und zugleich erste Erfahrungen mit der Erstellung veröffentlichungsfähiger Manuskripte zu sammeln. Hilfestellung und Anleitung geben dabei als Redaktion Wissenschaftler/innen der Arbeitsgruppe.

Diese Folge führt drei Beiträge zusammen, die eine biografische Perspektive teilen. Im Wintersemester 2020/21 haben sich Studierende im Seminar “Das Ende der Einwanderung? Wissenschaft in der Debatte um Identität und Migration in den USA zwischen 1917 und 1965” mit wissenschaftlicher Wissensproduktion im Kontext der Neuaushandlung von Migrationspolitik und gesellschaftlichem Selbstverständnis als „Einwanderungsland“ in den USA auseinander gesetzt. Im Mittelpunkt dabei standen progressive Wissenschaftler/innen, die über die seit den 1920er Jahren dominierende Abschottungspolitik der „closed door“ hinaus geblickt haben.

Zwei Autor:innenteams des Seminars haben Ihre Beiträge zu Essays für unseren Blog ausgearbeitet:

Den Anfang macht unter dem Titel „EINWANDERUNG“ NEU DENKEN? MAURICE R. DAVIE, HENRY P. FAIRCHILD UND DONALD R. TAFT ALS VERTRETER EINER PROGRESSIVEN MIGRATIONSFORSCHUNG IN DEN USA DER ZWISCHENKRIEGSZEIT Victoria Schneider und Elanur Gayran. Sie befassen sich mit Werk und Rezeption dreier Sozialwissenschaftler, die mit ihren Monographien über die amerikanische Migrationsgesellschaft und ihre Migrationspolitik darauf abzielten, der Debatte ihrer Zeit eine neue Richtung zu geben.

Dann folgt der Beitrag „A FRIEND OF EMIGRANTS“ . MARY E. HURLBUTT, EINE PIONIERIN DER VERBINDUNG VON SOZIALER ARBEIT UND MIGRATIONSFORSCHUNG von Sharleen Miebach, Jana Reuleke & Simon Hellbaum. Die drei Autor:innen widmen sich einer der progressivsten und oft überhörten Stimmen einer Neukonzeption partizipativer Integration von Migrant:innen in den USA zwischen praktischer Sozialer Arbeit und wissenschaftlichem Diskurs.

Als dritter Beitrag schließt eine genderkritische Perspektive auf wissenschaftliche Wissensproduktion, gesellschaftliches Engagement und den Kampf um Agency, den Frauen, hier die Chemikerin und Friedensaktivistin Gertrud Woker, im 20. Jahrhundert geführt haben, diese Serie. Der Essay IM NAMEN DER MENSCHHEIT UND IM NAMEN DER WÜRDE DER WISSENSCHAFT: GERTRUD WOKER ALS AKTEURIN ZWISCHEN WISSENSCHAFT UND AKTIVISMUS IN DER GIFTGASDEBATTE DER ZWISCHENKRIEGSZEIT von Jessica Wehner basiert auf der exzellenten Masterarbeit der Autorin aus dem Jahr 2021.

The Product of War Is Death

Sebastian Bondzio, Lukas Hennies, Christoph Rass

Russia’s Attacks on Civilian Targets @ NYT

On Wednesday, March 23rd, 2022, the New York Times published an animated map showing Russian attacks on civil targets in Ukraine. Up to this date, the invading Russian forces had hit and destroyed about 1.500 “civilian buildings, structures, and vehicles”. More than 953 civilians had been killed, with an unknown number of unreported civil casualties to add. A month into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, estimates of the number of Russian soldiers who died in the war ranged between 10.000 and 15.000, the number of dead among the Ukrainian soldiers defending their country remains unknown. At the end of March 2022, 10 million people had been displaced by the Russian attack on Ukraine and weeks of brutal and criminal warfare. About three million Ukrainians have fled across an international border and thus became refugees. Displacement, destruction, injury, trauma, and death are the dimensions of suffering in yet another war that produces the loss of human life – killing and dying – as its primary and irreversible outcome.

The impact of the production of death in war on societies in history is a long-standing field of research at NGHM@UOS. Our projects have looked at how the Nazi Regime built its war machine and produced a community, the “Volksgemeinschaft”, ready to wage a war that turned into a war of annihilation, the Holocaust, and genocides, while the “Third Reich” was relying on a murderous war economy driven by millions of forced- and slave laborers. We study forced displacement and the struggle of survivors of Nazi persecution – the “displaced persons” of the early post-war years are a striking example of the efforts and resources needed, over decades, to cope with caring for the survivors of mass displacement by war and genocide.

We work with our partners in Belarus and Ukraine to detect, document, and preserve sites of mass killing where thousands were murdered during the Holocaust and the German war of annihilation. Our projects on 2nd World War “battlefields” and German concentration camps contribute to a critical culture of memory as a cornerstone of public history and help uncover the hidden traces of the war and Nazi terror underground. In working with DPAA, as part of our research on the Huertgenwald battlefield, we assist in searching for still missing U.S. Servicemen whom the Wehrmacht killed in the bitter fighting there in 1944/45. Out of our joint project with the Esterwegen camp system memorial (Gedenkstätte Esterwegen) grew a search for yet unknown graves of Soviet POWs in the area.

Our research on how mounting military casualties impacted civil society (“Heimatfront”) in Germany during the First World War expanded our interest in the history of military casualties from the killing grounds of modern warfare to the social contexts where the loss of life was experienced emotionally: the homes, families, and everyday lives from where men were drafted into armies – or volunteered to serve –,  left to fight and kill – and die – in a war. The homes to which later not a traumatized veteran returned, but a letter was delivered announcing the death of a loved one.

An interactive map projecting the military casualties from World War One to their home addresses at Osnabrück.

We began to wonder how the death of hundreds of thousands of soldiers, mostly men, at “the front” was mirrored by the dispersion of casualties across their neighborhoods, hometowns, countries. Where did the soldiers from a specific town or city die? In what patterns was their death experienced at home?

What were the temporal, spatial, and social dynamics of the impact of war at home? Where did the “soldiers” actually come from, who would miss and mourn them, and – on a macro level – how are military casualties dispersed across society? Would the patterns of how military casualties hit the “homefront” help to explain how societies managed to keep waging war? Would we learn something about how families, collectives, societies coped with the fear of losing a son, father, brother, husband and receiving the dreaded notice? How did societies deal with the contesting needs evoked by the presence of different and often extreme emotions? What cultural changes did the losses and emotions lead to, and how did emerging war cultures help societies at home to remain able to wage war? Would the production of death and its impact and the coping mechanisms we would find help us understand how war-making was sustained and when societies reached a breaking point and decided to end the killing?  

Far from being able to provide convincing answers (please find some in our more extensive publications), this short essay draws together some of our explorations in historical big data on military casualties we have used to model the production of death of military personnel in war throughout the 20th century.

The “Deutsche Dienststelle”, today part of the German Federal Archives, has the most comprehensive collection of Wehrmacht personnel and casualty files.

Data on men killed as soldiers during modern wars is abundant. Armies and bureaucracies have left giant tomes of files created to manage millions of men in mass armies while keeping track of enlistments, the number and structure of casualties, to determine how much “human material” stood ready to be sent into battle, how many died or got wounded and how many replacements would have to be mobilized to keep up the fight. Creating honor lists and administering benefits to veterans and their families required more bookkeeping on the loss of human lives when a war ends.

The resulting lists serve administrative or commemorative purposes. They also allow researchers to build detailed models of the one thing war delivers: death. Far from neglecting the price always paid by civilian populations in military conflicts, this essay will focus on several examples where military records were used to look at military casualties from a different perspective: How did military operations translate to societies at home through the experience of losing someone who died as a soldier?

The examples presented here cover the period from the First World War to the Vietnam War and represent a different angle: we look at mobilization, casualties from a single city, the death toll of a major battle, the dead and wounded from individual military units and the losses sufferd by an entire society in two wars.

Missouri goes to war – 1917.

Patterns of enlistment in the U.S. Army in Missouri prior and during World War One.

The first example provides an idea of how modern societies mobilize for war, based on a dataset containing information on about 150.000 U.S. Army Veterans from Missouri. The dataset begins in the late 1870s showing only very few men enlisting. This only changes in the 1910s and gained more and more momentum after the war began in Europe during the summer of 1914. Mobilization reached its climax 1917/18 reflecting a gigantic buildup of the American armed forces. About 4.7 million men and women would eventually serve during the First World war and the Armed forces of the United States would lose 54.402 of its personnel in combat and an additional 63.114 non-battle casualties.

Our model thus demonstrates the immense dynamics of mobilization as the USA entered the war in 1917. Geocoded by addresses and the date of enlistment, the data re-draws the map of cities like St. Louis and Kansas City, both ranked among the ten largest cities in the USA and mirrors the increasing speed and dimensions of enlistment across the state. Only a fraction of the men who went into the army from Missouri were deployed overseas. The National Archives list a total of 2.485 soldiers from the state who lost their lives in the “Great War”, representing roughly 1.6 percent of the enlistees in the entire dataset. This fascinating dataset could, of course, be explored in greater depth to look at the social profile of the soldiers, their pathway into the army and war, or the injuries they suffered.  

Experiencing loss: a German town 1914-1918

The number of casualties recorded for the state of Missouri roughly matches the number of men from the German town of Osnabrück killed between 1914 and 1918 as soldiers of the Prussian Army. Two million men from the German Empire died as soldiers during the “Great War”. About fifteen percent of families in a town like Osnabrück had to confront losing one or more relatives in a city which sent an estimated 15.000 men went to war, at least one from each extended family.

While dying and killing in war are often discussed with reference to the killing fields at the front (“Massensterben”), we decided to look at how the casualties were dispersed when projected back onto the soldier’s homes.

When doing so, it is essential to know that armies count their soldiers by units and, throughout the 20th century, military units in most European armies were recruited from specific, smaller, or larger geographical regions into specific units attached to those areas. Military units thus often, at least at the beginning of a war, had a distinct regional character. However, men from a specific recruitment area or district were put into a relatively large number of different units assigned to that particular area, and eventually, regional cohesion would become harder and harder to maintain when losses were mounting and finding replacements became more difficult and chaotic.  

Such mechanisms of mobilization and personnel management in modern military organizations allow us to take three different perspectives on the data:

(a) In battle, casualties are often listed by the military units deployed – in fact, most historical documents on casualties are produced following a military logic as part of tracking losses, determining strength, and the need for replacements, on the one hand, keeping track of “fallen soldiers” to organize care for their remaining families on the other; (b) casualties from individual units can often not just be related to specific battles but also be projected back onto their recruitment bases. Such data will then represent a fraction of the losses suffered by the people living there since it still mirrors the unit-centered military logic. (c) This changes when we look at all military casualties from a specific area, town or village – those usually come from a multitude of different units -, or an entire country to understand how the death of military personnel impacts a war-waging society on all levels.

Thus, depending on the mode of recruitment, the way military units are organized, and the casualties they suffer are logged, the production of death looks very different when framed by a “battle”, by the losses of an individual military unit or the losses suffered in a specific region at the “homefront”. Most historical documents reproduce the military’s point of view. But does that protocol of death represent the way that such losses impact a war-waging society?

A case study on three regiments of the Prussian Army fighting in the First World War provides a visual example of how casualties of individual units linked back to their recruitment base. Infantry Regiment (IR) 78, Reserve Infantry Regiment (RIR) 92, and RIR 229 drafted most of their soldiers from Northern Germany from three overlapping districts moving from West to East. At the same time, while most of the men came from these districts, the birthplaces of the soldiers were dispersed all over the German Empire and even beyond its borders. For example, RIR 229 was first mustered in Breslau at the end of 1914 and, in 1915, became reinforced by a replacement battalion of the IR 78. This merger drastically changed the regional composition of the regiment and threw men from very different regional and cultural backgrounds together in one unit.  

Projection of casualties on their hometowns: IR 78, RIR 229, IR 92

Infantry Regiment 78 of the Prussian Army had its battalions garrisoned in different towns across Northwestern Germany, with one of those garrisons being Osnabrück. Many soldiers from the city served in this regiment during the First World War. In “their” regiment, men from Osnabrück represented a larger group but by no means a majority. An animated map of the casualties of the entire regiment over time and space shows the vast geographic and social space the regiment’s soldiers were hailing from. Besides the spatial dimension, casualties also had a specific temporal pattern. Whenever the regiment went into battle and losses occurred (red dots indicate places where (multiple) deaths occurred), these were transmitted home (blue dots) and occurred there in distinct spatial and temporal clusters.

In-between battles, when the regiment was moved between the Western and the Eastern front, different sections of the front lines or went into recreational spaces for refitting, almost no casualties were reported back home for days, weeks, or even occasionally months at a time. On a regimental level, deaths thus occurred in high-intensity clusters determined by events at the front line with calm periods in-between dictated by the rhythms of modern trench warfare. The losses drew distinct spatial and temporal patterns on the battlefields but also in its recruitment area.  

Places of death and hometowns of casualties from IR 78.

Concerning the home front, however, this is only half the picture. Shifting the focus to individual cities or towns, like Osnabrück, a regional economic and administrational center and thus also a typical Prussian garrison with several large barracks billeting units from several regiments, puts the production of death into another perspective.

The towns register of war dead from World War One, preserved in the State Archives of Lower Saxony, provides detailed information on more than 2.200 men who served in the Prussian Army (and the Imperial Navy) and died as soldiers during the war or in hospitals in the immediate post-war period. They were drafted into dozens of military units, which sometimes went into action simultaneously, but they were on separate trajectories for most of the war. Units engaged in the same battle could also suffer distinctly different numbers of casualties depending on the specific sector and phase in which they saw action. Projecting all the men from Osnabrück onto their home addresses in town listed in their recruitment papers thus shows how these different circumstances across dozens of military units resulted in the pattern of losses experienced by families at Osnabrück.       

Projection of casualties from Osnabrück on their home addresses.

Between 1914 and 1918, on average, every 16 hours, a soldier died, and a death notice had to be sent to one family’s home in Osnabrück. There were peaks during the spring and summer months when significant battles were fought, and lesser numbers during the autumns and winters. In Osnabrück, the casualties did not only arrive in a specific temporal pattern, they were also spatially distributed across the complex social topography of the city – with different patterns in the upscale quarters of the bourgeois in the West and the densely settled working-class neighborhoods in the southern and eastern parts of town.

Interestingly, extreme heights in the production of death as documented by the aggregate casualty statistics of the Prussian Army were often cut off locally by the mix of different units recruiting men from the town and their specific patterns of high and low-intensity casualties that depended on the when and where of their combat missions. When IR 78 suffered high losses, only a fraction of those losses would actually link back to Osnabrück. While soldiers from one unit died together in their sector of deployment, the losses were dispersed across the unit’s entire recruiting area and thus never became visible in one single location or space in their entirety. By the same token, local casualties could exceed the overall trend in military losses when, by chance, multiple units related to an area suffered medium or high losses at the same time.

Casualties from the Prussian Field Army and Osnabrück indexed: in 1914/15 Osnabrück suffered excess losses while in 1916 (Verdun) the town was spared the extreme peak in dasualties.

Soldiers originating from one town or place died in many different units in many different places and only represented a fraction of the casualties suffered in the field by their particular military unit. This could cause a certain cushioning effect which made the losses even of massive death-producing events like the fighting at Verdun in 1916 – where hundreds of thousands of deaths occurred in a distinct area within only a few months of fighting – being felt “at home” in a different way.

Killed soldiers from Osnabrück projected onto the place of death at the Western Front.

Of course, there were places in the German Reich that suffered high casualties from the Verdun, but for a lot of other places – like Osnabrück – the dispersal of the dead across thousands of different places made the impact of this particular event less hard. The focus on losses in a specific battle thus misses the complexities of how losses at the frontline translated to home – as the experience of loss and grief -, while the focus on individual experiences and mourning misses the macro-effect of war casualties hitting home. We propose to apply such reflected approaches to avoid the reproduction the military logic of data collection and knowledge production when talking about the impact of war through casualties at home.

The death of soldiers from Osnabrück at the Western Front geocoded.

The different unit’s soldiers from Osnabrück fought in, and these units’ different patterns of battle deployments made us aware of the complexity of the production of death during the First World War. The dynamic map showing the geocoded places of death for soldiers from Osnabrück draws a picture of the front lines, East and West, between the Entente and the Middle Powers. At the other end, a map of the city of Osnabrück gets sprinkled with a steady stream of death notices arriving at the homes of men KIA (“killed in action”).

Killed soldiers from Osnabrück projected at their home adresses.

A single battle: Gelibolu 1915/16

Analyzing the impact of one single large-scale battle of the First World War in detail yields further insights. Turning to the meso-level, the Canakkale/Gelibolu/Gallipoli campaign provides a gruesome example.

To establish a maritime support route for the struggling Russian Empire, in 1915, Allied forces tried to deal the Ottoman Empire a lethal blow by invading the Gelibolu peninsula at the entrance to the Dardanelles, attempting a push towards Constantinople. The ensuing battle raged from February 1915 to January 1916. According to published research, the British, French, Australian, and New Zealand units deployed in the campaign suffered a total of 56.707 fatal casualties (the all over death toll including missing and non-recovered soldiers, men who died of wounds sustained at Gellibolu elsewhere, or died in POW-camps will probably be higher than this figure). The Ottoman Army suffered 56.643 battle casualties, with a very large number of other deaths attributed to missing soldiers, men who died of diseases or their injuries but not instantly on the battlefield probably not being included in that number.

We have geocoded a dataset with information on the Ottoman casualties produced by the Army of the Republic of Turkey to show the place of birth for each casualty. The dataset lists 50.688 soldiers of the Ottoman Army killed in the Gelibolu campaign. While the campaign is usually dated from 2/1915 to 1/1916, the dataset spans from April 15th, 1915, the beginning of the Allied landing and ground assault, to December 12th, 1917, which probably reflects the death of soldiers from wounds suffered in the battle at later times (dates were converted from the Maliye Calendar to the Gregorian Calendar).  

A geocoded analysis leads to a map showing how one battle fought over roughly one year during the First World War produced a pattern of loss and mourning across the territory of modern Turkey and adjacent regions then still part of the crumbling Ottoman Empire. A similar analysis would probably be possible based on the casualty data collected in New Zealand or Australia, for instance.

Animated to show how the casualties occurred over time, losses move across Turkey in waves corresponding with the more intense phases of the battle – the initial invasion in April 1915 or the Allied offensive in August – while pauses indicate the emerging trench warfare and variations in the magnitude of fighting and killing.

When color-coded by the different Army Corps deployed in the battle, the spatial analysis reveals geographical recruitment patterns in the Ottoman Army. Each army corps had a distinct core zone of recruiting and took in men from provinces outside these zones, albeit in lesser numbers. As the fighting at Gelibolu stretched over months after month and Ottoman units suffered high losses, the dispersion of the casualties across time indicates that various Army Corps were present in different phases of the battle in an overlapping sequence. This, in turn, means that in terms of news about deaths at Gelibolu reaching the soldier’s families at home, the battle also impacted different regions of Turkey with varying intensity at other times. 

Spatial recruitment patterns of the Ottoman Army by Army Corps deployed to Gelibolu.

And again, while at Gelibolu today, monuments and graveyards, like on so many historical conflict landscapes, essentialize dying in war on a battlefield, projecting the killed soldiers onto the places of their civilian lives helps to turn the perspective from the production of heroes to the loss of loved ones at home. This dimension of the war experience is mirrored by the way the main cemetery of the Ottoman Army on the Gelibolu Peninsular is laid out: The graves are organized by major cities and provinces. At the same time, it is difficult to trace individual families, as the Ottoman Empire did not know “family names” which were only introduced in the early years of the Turkish Republic.

In the path of death: Wehrmacht units 1939-1945

To study the impact of losses in a German infantry unit during the Second World War, we went back to the micro-level of one single company. We chose the 1st Company of Infantry Regiment 464, which was part of the 253rd Infantry Division of the German Wehrmacht. A rather average unit whose men waged Hitler’s criminal war in all its dark shades from 1939 to 1945.

“Burned villages” destroyed during the German occupation of Belarus 1941-44.

This war of annihilation, as we have recently shown in a study on about 9.103 “burned villages” that the Germans left in ruins in Belarus between 1941 and 1944 with countless civilian victims, made unspeakable violence against the civilian population an essential part of its everyday strategies.   

In the First World War, fighting – at least on the western front – was centered around massive trench systems that emerged and became fortified after the short initial phase of mobile warfare had failed to bring military success. Based on the experience of seemingly endless trench warfare, German military strategy in the Second World War was deliberately designed to avoid another stalemate. The dominant mode of operation was thus movement, in advance or retreat, broken by shorter or longer periods of static fighting or occupation.

Deployment of the 253rd Infantry Division/Wehrmacht 1939/40-45.

This is mirrored in the movements of Wehrmacht infantry divisions. The 253rd Infantry Division, a unit of the 4th (1939) wave of mobilization – and thus an average Division – did not take part in the assault on Poland but was used to attack in the West in May 1940. It quickly went through Belgium and France, served briefly on occupation duties there before it was moved into occupied Poland to prepare for the invasion of the Soviet Union.

In June 1941, it crossed the line of demarcation between the parts of Poland occupied by Germany and Russia to become part of the German war of annihilation against the Soviet Union, advanced with the Army Group Center to the city of Reshew, and, after the winter of 1940/41, would spend the next four years in a series of defensive battles, retreats and holding operations in various sectors of the eastern front – while building a brutal regime of occupation and exploitation in its rear areas whenever possible. In March of 1944, for example, the infantry division was – like all divisions and army corps of the Wehrmacht’s 9th Army – part of the massive deportation of civilians to the Ozarichi camp system in Belarus, one of the most significant and most brutal war crimes committed by the Wehrmacht.  

Casualties (wounded=red, killed=green) of 1./464 geocoded.

Following one infantry company from the 253rd Infantry Divisions 464rd Infantry Regiment mirrors this pathway of death and destruction.

We gathered data from the “Erkennungsmarkenverzeichnis” (a rough equivalent of the “morning report” produced by units of the U.S. Army) of 1./464 company which is available from 1939 to early 1945, providing data on every soldier transferred in or out of that unit. To sustain an average strength of 100 to 150 men throughout most of the war, more than 1.500 individual soldiers went in and out of 1./464 between late 1939 and early 1945.

The casualty reports of 1./464 list a total of 936 men who died or were transferred out of the unit wounded or sick, 233 soldiers were listed as “killed in action”. Mapping the data on wounded and killed soldiers shows the sequence of advances and retreats and fighting with a sharp difference in intensity between the invasion of France and the attack on the Soviet Union and a gruesome crescendo as the war turned against Nazi Germany. Also, the map shows the ratio of wounded and killed men as a rough share of 25 percent of the casualties being fatal or permanent (killed, missing, prisoner of war) and the rest being wounded or sick (who would eventually return to duty).

Unit dynamics and origin of Soldiers in 1./464.

This diagram shows each incidence horizontally when a soldier was transferred in (blue) and out (red) of 1./464 and time on the vertical axis. We thus see the dynamics of how many soldiers were needed to sustain a single company of combat infantry. An animated map shows the hometowns of soldiers drafted into 1./464 over time. This animation provides some interesting findings: In the early stages of the war, most men came from the recruitment base of the 253rd Infantry Division in the Rhineland.

As the war progressed and losses mounted, the regional composition of the unit began to lose spatial cohesion as soldiers from all over the “Third Reich” were shoved into the ranks to maintain the unit’s operability. Furthermore, as this map shows all the units soldiers and not only those who died in the war, it points out that only a small fraction of the soldiers in a particular unit were killed. Most of them survived the war.

Beyond the World Wars: US casualties from the wars in Korea and Vietnam

For our last two examples, we move to the macro-level of entire wars and use records on military personnel killed in action for two major wars in the United States’ history of the 20th century kept by the National Archives and Records Administration of the USA in Alexandria, VA (NARA).

US Casualties of the wars in Korea and Vietnam by year.

While available American data on the First and the Second World War does not include the hometowns or -counties of individual soldiers, data for the war in Korea and the war in Vietnam list where the men came from. For the Korean War, lists show the soldier’s home counties, for the Vietnam War, actual places of birth or residence were recorded. This allowed for visualizing the dynamics of the spatial impact of both wars on American society.

US casualties from the Korean War

The NARA-Data on the Korean War lists 36.573 cases dating from 1950 to 1953 (one case from 1954). The dispersion of the war dead across the USA shows how the densely populated Eastern and Midwest Areas were hit hard in 1950 and 1951, as were the larger cities on the West Coast. Later in the war, the density of losses diminishes, and only towards the end do casualties mount again.

A space/time model of the impact of war losses in Korea 1951-53

We thus can observe the different phases of the war. Furthermore, it becomes clear how costly the initial phase of U.S. troop deployment war was and how stalemates tended to stretch the duration of the conflict with relatively low casualties. For future research, it is relevant to understand the relation between the actual losses and how American society talked about this production of death. Including public discourses in such analysis leads to a mixed-method approach that allows for a deeper understanding of how particular societies perceive and cope with death in war and how much of it they were willing to bear to reach a political objective. This way, historians might better understand the relevant factors that enabled a society to sustain prolonged engagement in a conflict and which coping mechanisms allowed them to bear the mounting loss of lives.

Casualties from the war in Korea geocoded by county.

US casualties from the Vietnam War

The 2nd Vietnam War is usually dated from 1954/55 to 1975. In contrast to the war in Korea, where the highest losses were experienced during the first year, this war produced a small number of US-American casualties during its first decade. The casualties were scattered in a loose spatial pattern across the USA. Beginning with an intensified U.S. engagement, especially after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of August 1964, the casualties suffered by U.S armed forces increased sharply. The NARA dataset on personnel from the U.S. armed forces who were killed in action or died of other conflict-related reasons in this war lists 58.219 cases, dating from 1955 to 1975 (with a handful of deaths occurring in 1987-2006).

A space/time model of the impact of war losses in Vietnam 1955-75

A buildup to higher casualty figures across the country occurred in the mid-1960s, when the U.S. officially declared war on North Vietnam, reaching its climax towards the end of the decade while about half a million U.S. soldiers were present in Vietnam. The fast and numerous turnover of personnel nescenssary to maintain this troop strengh due to the “tour of duty”-system, made the Vietnam war a “veteran-producing” conflict. The return of large numbers of traumatized men and women from the conflict over a prolonged period while the conflict was draging on, and the increasingly critical media coverage of the violence and American casualties abroad played a significant role in breaking the will to continue this war. This points to the importance of how war victims and casualties are translated into public, media, political and also historical discourse, how death in war is framed, explained, made visible or invisible, is subject to free debate of supressed.

As U.S. troops began to disengage, withdraw, and “Vietnamize” the conflict in the early 1970s, the number/density of the losses declined until the war officially ended in 1975.

Casualties from the Vietnam War geocoded by place of birth.

Looking at the nexus between military casualties, the experience of loss and grief at home, discourses on military engagement and its price, and the perception of outcomes as “victory” or “defeat” helps to better understand why wars are ended or carried on. A comparison between the Korean War and the Vietnam War from that perspective could also contribute to deconstructing the emergence of different narratives about wars.

Reflection

Without going deeper into the analysis of the social profile of the military casualties based on the information available in the documents used in this essay to create simple digital models of how the production of death in war impacted societies from a chronological and spatial perspective, and without a broader discussion of the temporal and geographic patterns the data showed, and also without zooming into the micro-level of individual counties, towns, villages, streets or families, we aimed at demonstrating how the droves of (historical big) data collected on dead soldiers can be used to turn our perspective on wars: Instead of focussing on reconstructing the killing and dying on battlefields, it is worthwhile to model the impact of death as the product of war onto war-making societies as well.

The fact that we can quickly gather mass data on “fallen soldiers” does however put up another question: It is to be asked whose death is deemed relevant and gets recorded. While most armies keep track of their casualties and many societies use such data, amongst other things, to prepare “lists of honor” and to put names of killed soldiers on monuments, it is a lot harder to find similar data on the loss of civilian lives beyond rough statistics.

Historical sources make dead soldiers very visible – most of the time, we are able to find out more documents about the dead than about the survivors – while other groups, civilians as victims of war and of war crimes, remain rather invisible as individuals. The efforts to collect individual data on the victims of the Shoah and other Nazi crimes amply demonstrate the difficulties to reconstruct biographies of civilian victims of genocide, war, and mass violence.

In many cases, there are much fewer documents with systematic collections of names and circumstances listing civil victims of war and violence on an individual case level for entire societies or conflicts, which points to questions of how the production of knowledge by states creates visibilities and invisibility that historians have to reflect when doing data-driven research.

The conclusion, however, stays the same: the main product of war is death, and it is time to stop viewing soldiers – who wage violence in war and suffer it – as heroes or victims on battlefields alone. They were and are people with homes, lives, families who are put in uniform and sent to kill and die. Their death makes a difference beyond the mere functioning or failure of a military apparatus. Societies forced to defend themselves, like Ukraine today, endure great sacrifice. Countries bringing themselves to attack and invade others have to ask themselves, today and as they look back at their history, if the production of death they deliver and suffer is ever worth their ill causes. 

Nein zum Krieg!

Gemeinsam mit Studierenden aus Belarus, Österreich und Deutschland erarbeiten die Geschichtswerkstatt Minsk und das IBB Dortmund in einem Projekt des Programms “Jugend erinnert” einen Podcast über den Vernichtungsort Maly Trostenez, an dem während des Zweiten Weltkrieges unter deutscher Besatzung Tausende Menschen ermordet wurden. Maly Trostenez nahe Minsk ist einer der größten Vernichtungsorte der Shoah auf dem Gebiet der ehemaligen Sowjetunion.

Heute, am 25. Februar 2022 drücken die Studierenden in aktuellen Folge ihres Podcasts mit der Botschaft “Nein zum Krieg!” ihre Solidarität mit der Ukraine und ihre pazifistische Position aus.

“Wir können nicht schweigen zu dem Krieg, der heute, im 21. Jahrhundert, in Europa stattfindet.”

Hören Sie die Botschaft, hören Sie den Podcast
Maly Trostenez: Gemeinsam erinnern“.

Neuerscheinung | Erste Ergebnisse zur Auswertung der “Osnabrücker Ausländermeldekartei”

Seit 2019 erforscht die Arbeitsgruppe NGHM in einem Verbundprojekt am Institut für Migrationsforschung und Interkulturelle Studien der Universität Osnabrück die “Ausländermeldekartei” (AMK) der Stadt Osnabrück für die Zeit von 1930 bis 1980. Wesentliche Ziele dabei sind die soziohistorische Modellierung wachsender migrationsinduzierter Diversität einer Stadtgesellschaft und Erkenntnisse über Pfadabhängigkeiten administrativer Wissensproduktion über Migration in personenbezogenen Massendaten. Diese verorten das Projekt in Forschungsschwerpunkten der Arbeitsgruppe zu data driven history , der wissensbasierten Produktion von Migration sowie der Geschichte von Migration und Gesellschaft.

Die Wanderungsbilnaz von Osnabrück 1930-1980, (c) NGHM@UOS

Wir arbeiten in Förderung durch das Niedersächsische Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur in Kooperation mit dem Niedersächsischen Landesarchiv und der Stadt Osnabrück. Grundlage unserer Forschung ist – unter strenger Beachtung datenschutz- und archivrechtlicher Rahmungen, ein vollständiges, maschinenlesbares Replikat der “Ausländermeldekartei”, die zwischen ca. 1930 und 1980 Informationen zu rund 70.000 Personen verzeichnete, die im Betrachtungszeitraum in Osnabrück gelebt haben, ohne die deutsche Staatsbürgerschaft zu besitzen. Vergleichbare Datensätze liegen der (Historischen) Migrationsforschung bisher kaum vor. Insofern leistet unser Vorhaben methodische und empirische Grundlagenarbeit.

Verteilung der in der AMK verzeichneten Wohnadressen, (c) NGHM@UOS

Nun sind in den Osnabrücker Mitteilungen (126/2021) erste Ergebnisse unseres Forschungsprojekts in einem Beitrag erschienen, der das Potential dieser historischen Massendaten für die Migrations- und Stadtgeschichtsforschung auslotet. Das Autor:innen-Team legt damit eine erste quellenkritische Perspektive auf das Material und einige grundlegende statistische Auswertungen zur Migration von Personen ohne deutsche Staatsbürgerschaft nach Osnabrück über einen Zeitraum von 50 Jahren vor. Gleichzeitig bieten Fallstudien zu Wohnbiografien, zur Aufnahme von “displaced persons” und “Heimatlosen Ausländern” sowie der Zuwanderung im Rahmen der Arbeitskräfteanwerbung zwischen 1955 und 1973 Einblicke in laufende Dissertationsprojekte, die das Datenmaterial der “Ausländermeldekartei” nutzen.

Nachlesen lassen sich die spannenden Erkenntisse des Projektteams in:

Sebastian Bondzio, Linda Ennen-Lange, Lukas Hennies, Sebastian Huhn, Max Pochadt, Christoph Rass & Janine Wasmuth: Die Osnabrücker Ausländermeldekartei 1930-1980. Potenziale als Quelle der Stadt- und Migrationsgeschichte, in: Osnabrücker Mitteilungen (126/2021), S. 137-194.