War Weimar eine gescheiterte Demokratie, oder der Höhepunkt einer Epoche, die sich selbst delegitimierte? Detlev Peukerts Die Weimarer Republik. Krisenjahre der klassischen Moderne – der zehnte Titel der NGHM-Leseliste aus dem Feld Deutsche Zeitgeschichte – verschob bei seiner Publikation im Jahr 1987 den Blick auf die erste deutsche Demokratie weg von einer bloßen Deutung als Vorgeschichte des Nationalsozialismus. An ihre Stelle trat die Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte einer Gesellschaft, in der die Modernisierung selbst pathogene Züge entfaltete.
Als das Buch im Suhrkamp-Verlag erschien, war Peukert wissenschaftlicher Assistent an der Universität Essen, wo er seit 1978 bei Lutz Niethammer gearbeitet hatte. 1988 übernahm er die Leitung der Forschungsstelle für die Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus in Hamburg, ein Jahr später wurde er zum Professor in Essen berufen. 1990 verstarb er, noch nicht 40 Jahre alt, an den Folgen von Aids. Promoviert hatte er 1979 bei Hans Mommsen über die KPD im Widerstand, habilitiert hatte er sich 1984 bei Niethammer mit einer Arbeit zur Geschichte der deutschen Jugendfürsorge. Bis 1978 Mitglied der DKP, danach der SPD, gehörte Peukert zu jener Generation westdeutscher Historiker:innen, die das Verhältnis von Wissenschaft und Holocaust als Frage der Moderne selbst zu stellen begann. Aus der Alltagsgeschichte kommend, entwickelte er einen Zugriff, der Sozialdisziplinierung, Sozialstaat und Aussonderung als Seiten desselben Prozesses lesbar machte.
Peukert liest die Republik nicht als Niedergangsgeschichte, sondern als Höhepunkt und zugleich Krisenphase der ›Klassischen Moderne‹, deren Epochenzuschnitt er bewusst nicht deckungsgleich mit der politischen Periode 1918–1933 setzt: Sie reicht für ihn von der Jahrhundertwende bis um 1930. Die Weimarer Republik steht in dieser Deutung unter dem Vorzeichen einer allgemeinen Krise dieses Umbruchs. Dabei kennzeichnet die Epoche keinen zaghaften, sondern einen beschleunigten Wandel: Sozialstaat, Massenkultur, Geschlechterordnungen und politische Konflikte entfalten sich gleichzeitig und delegitimieren sich gegenseitig. Die Republik wurde, so Peukert, schließlich von bestimmten Kräften zum Scheitern gebracht, ohne dass dieses Scheitern zwingend determiniert gewesen wäre.
Methodisch verbindet Peukert dabei politische Strukturanalyse mit Sozialpolitik-, Alltags- und Kulturgeschichte. Den ›mittleren Jahren‹ der Republik, etwa zwischen 1924 und 1929, gibt er besonderes Gewicht: An ihnen zeigen sich bei Peukert Krisenanfälligkeit und Belastbarkeit des Gemeinwesens zugleich. Eine seiner Charakterisierungen der Weimarer Kultur, die das mondäne und atemlose Durchspielen aller Möglichkeiten der Moderne in einer Bewegung beschreibt, in der die Stilarten erprobt und nahezu gleichzeitig wieder verworfen werden, ist über das Buch hinaus zur Formel geworden: Norbert Lammert hat sie in seinem Festvortrag vor der Shakespeare-Gesellschaft 2009 in Weimar aufgegriffen.
Zu finden in der UB UOS. Signatur 6209-598 5.
Das Buch gilt bis heute als Standardwerk. Helmut Walser Smith würdigt Peukert in einer Rezension des von Rüdiger Hachtmann und Sven Reichardt herausgegebenen Sammelbandes Detlev Peukert und die NS-Forschung (2015) als einen der produktivsten deutschen Nachkriegshistoriker und das Weimar-Buch als verblüffende Synthese. Allerdings setzte auch die Kritik früh ein. Smith und andere Beiträger:innen des Bandes problematisieren den Begriff der ›Klassischen Moderne‹ als zu vage. Ähnlich grundsätzlich kritisiert Frank Bajohr in seinem Beitrag, dass Peukert nahezu ohne internationale, vergleichende Perspektive arbeitete und dass der Bezug zum Antisemitismus und zur konkreten Praxis der NS-Politik in seinem Werk unterbelichtet blieb. Auf einer anderen Ebene setzten Moritz Föllmer und Rüdiger Graf an: Sie befragten die enge Verknüpfung von ›Weimar‹ und ›Krise‹ als historiografisches Narrativ, deren Ergebnisse 2005 in dem Sammelband Die ›Krise‹ der Weimarer Republik erschienen. Christoph Thonfeld ordnet die Studie 2016 in Krisenjahre revisited historiografisch ein: Sie sei rasch stilbildend für einen sozial- und kulturgeschichtlichen Zugriff auf die Weimarer Republik geworden, habe aber, so seine Bilanz nach rund zwei Jahrzehnten Forschung, letztlich mehr Fragen aufgeworfen als sie beantwortet habe.
Denn die Inkongruenz zwischen Peukerts Epochenzuschnitt der Klassischen Moderne und der politischen Periode 1918–1933 ist kein Webfehler des Buches, sondern sein analytisches Programm. Wer die Republik nicht aus 1933 zurückliest, sondern in einen längeren Bogen ambivalenter, destruktiv-pathogener Modernisierung stellt, gewinnt den Blick auf Konfliktlinien, die in einer Niedergangserzählung verschwinden würden. Peukerts Weimar ist eine Gesellschaft, die mit ihrer eigenen Modernität nicht zurechtkommt, weil sie zu viel davon zugleich erlebt.
Wer in den ersten Beiträgen dieser Reihe Foucaults Argument folgt, dass moderne Macht produktiv wirkt, also Subjekte, Wissen und Kategorien hervorbringt, kann Peukerts Zugriff als eine zeitgeschichtliche Anwendung dieses Arguments verstehen: Sozialstaat und Sozialdisziplinierung, Fürsorge und Aussonderung erscheinen in der Klassischen Moderne dann nicht als Gegensätze, sondern als zwei Seiten desselben Prozesses.
Später in dieser Reihe wird mit Ulrich Herberts Das Dritte Reich ein Werk besprochen, das Peukerts Frage nach der Moderne als Bedingung des NS in andere methodische Bahnen lenkt. Zugleich lässt sich eine Nebenspur des Werks so deuten, dass die Frage nach den Schattenseiten der Moderne für Peukert keine ausschließlich deutsche war: Zwischen 1984 und 1987 publizierte er mehrere Arbeiten zur Geschichte Lateinamerikas, darunter 1986 unter der hispanisierten Form seines bürgerlichen Namens, Detlev Julio K. Peukert, im Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas einen spanischsprachigen Beitrag über die wiederholten Annexionsangebote der Dominikanischen Republik an die USA im 19. Jahrhundert.
Osnabrücker Studierende finden Peukerts Die Weimarer Republik in der Bibliothek Alte Münze unter der Signatur LQO 6209-598 5 (OPAC).
Detlev Peukert (1950–1990), Die Weimarer Republik. Krisenjahre der klassischen Moderne, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1987.
Dieser Beitrag gehört zur Reihe NGHM liest, in der die 65 Titel der NGHM-Leseliste vorgestellt werden. Die Liste kann als Wissensgraph erkundet werden.
This essay follows an animated visualization built from Osnabrück’s historic foreigners’ registration index to ask, from the perspective of CRC 1604 ‘Produktion von Migration’, whether a bureaucratic register merely records migration — or helps produce it.
On the screen (see animation below), the year 1943 burns in two colors. Blue points drift in from the west, green points from the east, and both settle into a dark map of Osnabrück that slowly fills with light wherever an address gathers many people at once. During the years of World War II and Nazi rule, the points do not represent ‘migrants’ but deportees, forced laborers brought to the city from the territories the ‘Third Reich’ occupied. A decade later, the palette turns. From the late 1950s, the incoming points run red, yellow, and orange: people moving to Osnabrück now hail from Spain, Italy, Portugal, Yugoslavia, or Turkey, from the UK or the Commonwealth. Labor migration under bilateral recruitment schemes and mobility tied to the large British garrison paint the picture.
Yet, no marker on the screen is a person. Each point is a record, an entry that a municipal office once made about someone it classified as a ‘foreigner’, and what we are watching is not migration but its administrative trace set in motion. We can watch it at all because the entire card index has since been reconstructed as machine-readable data, card by card, in an NGHM-research project at Osnabrück University.1
1943 movement data recorded in the Osnabrücker “Ausländermeldekartei” (Visualization: crass).
1974 movement data recorded in the Osnabrücker “Ausländermeldekartei” (Visualization: crass).
This is the center of what follows: an animation built from the Ausländermeldekartei of the city of Osnabrück, the foreigners’ registration index that the city administration kept on paper cards from 1930 to 1980, before its registration system was digitized.1 The animation belongs to a longer line of work at Osnabrück on the datafication of bureaucracy. Its digitization and analysis are the work of the project “Massendatenbasierte Langzeitmodelle migrationsinduziert wachsender Diversität im urbanen Kontext”, directed by Christoph Rass and Andreas Pott at the University of Osnabrück, funded by the Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and Culture and carried out together with the Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv and the city of Osnabrück.
In 2026, I read this data from the conceptual program of the Collaborative Research Centre 1604, Produktion von Migration. My argument moves from the image to the data behind it, from the data to the project that produced them, from there to the theoretical claim that a register does not record migration but helps produce it, and finally to the question that any such visualization must answer: how does one map an administrative apparatus without reprinting its categories as truth? The animation, I will argue, is most useful precisely where it refuses to behave like a conventional migration map.
Movements to and from and within Osnabrück by inhabitants of non-German nationality 1938-1980 as recorded in the municipal “Ausländermeldekartei” [(c) crass].
What moves on the screen
The animation derives from the digitized registration index an event model of residential movement. Every card records a sequence of addresses with dates; each transition between two addresses becomes one documented movement. The model reconstructs 207,325 such movements for 70,294 people: arrivals in Osnabrück, moves within the city, and departures. More than nine in ten of these movements carry exact coordinates. Osnabrück addresses are placed on the official municipal geocodes, transformed from the UTM grid to latitude and longitude; foreign places are deliberately resolved only to the level of the country.
A word on the period, since the data are uneven. The index was kept between 1930 and 1980, and the movement data became continuously reliable only from about 1938. The animation therefore runs from 1938 to 1980, and it states its window on screen at every moment. A further caution concerns the word ‘migration’ itself, because the index flattens what it gathers. The bright inflows of the war years are not migration in any ordinary sense. Between 1939 and 1945 the cards (partially) register the National Socialist forced-labor system already glimpsed above: the conscripted are fixed to registered addresses dominated by the forced-labor camps erected across the city.1
What follows is again distinct. The post-war growth records the survivors of that system, first as ‘displaced persons’ and, from 1950, as ‘homeless foreigners’ (Heimatlose Ausländer), the administrative aftermath of a violence-induced mobility rather than a fresh departure. Only from the late 1950s does the index document recruited labor migration, the ‘guest workers’ of the bilateral agreements, a euphemism the National Socialist state had already used to dress coercion as ordinary recruitment.2 To let coercion, displacement, and recruitment run under a single heading, as one field of moving points must, is already a category effect: they share an apparatus, not a phenomenon.
The visual grammar of the map animation is austere by design. Each datapoint represents a registered person as a small resting dot at their current address; where many people share an address, a company dormitory, say, the points pile into a bright node, so that brightness reads as occupancy. When someone moves, the point flies along a curved arc to the new address. Around the city sits a ring of countries of origin, arranged roughly by compass direction: arrivals fly inward from the ring, departures fly outward, as two separate, oppositely curved arcs. Color encodes the region of origin throughout. No connecting lines are drawn at all. Density and flow emerge only from the superimposition of many points, in the manner of the particle-flow maps that Max Galka and others made familiar, while the ring borrows the idea of directed in- and out-streams from the circular migration diagrams popularized by Guy Abel and Nikola Sander.3
From card to dataset: the Osnabrück registration project
The animation would be unreadable without the project that turned a drawer of cards into a research dataset. The digitized index comprises some 56,613 mostly double-sided cards holding information on around 70,000 people, and it is the first mass card index of its kind made accessible to research as a digitized dataset.4 For the operating period, the digitized dataset documents 66,111 arrivals in Osnabrück, 51,421 departures, and 99,264 changes of address across 10,720 distinct addresses.5
The extraction itself was done in 2020 with the AI-service provider omni:us, whose systems read strongly structured documents.6 Computer vision built on convolutional neural networks recognized document structure, and here the index posed a particular obstacle: twenty-five different form versions had to be identified before any field could be read. Natural-language processing characterized documents by word markers; recurrent neural networks read the handwritten entries. The raw tables were then rebuilt into a relational database that allows the growth of the index to be simulated over time and individual cards to be reconstructed as digital images, and the Osnabrück addresses were geocoded in cooperation with the city’s geodata service. Automated extraction proved not only faster and cheaper than manual capture but, against expectation, less error-prone, with every data point tied back to the card image for correction.
The pioneer project that led to this outcome is our work on the Osnabrück Gestapo index, which Sebastian Bondzio and I analyzed in a DFG-funded project as a ‘mass data store and world model’ (Massendatenspeicher und Weltmodell): the first attempt to extract by machine the entire data content of an analogue mass index, and an argument that such a card index is less a source about individuals than a body of historical mass data.7 The card index, on this reading, was a datafication technology long before the digital era. Data never represent an objective, observer-independent world model, and they never simply speak for themselves.8
Our published findings show what the dataset affords. In a 2021 study, we read the index through four cases: the dispersed settlement of arrivals in the mid-1950s, which fits no simple model of ‘arrival quarters’; the sharp post-war growth of those classified as ‘homeless foreigners’ among the displaced; the Latvian ‘watchmen’ whose wartime records were rewritten into employment with the British Army of the Rhine; and more than 3,800 cards for Italians between 1930 and 1980, tracing the fluid passage from ostensibly temporary labor to permanent family settlement.9 A separate study followed Spanish migration to Osnabrück between 1960 and 1980.10 This animation does not replace these close readings, it sets them in motion.
The register does not mirror migration: it produces it
Why insist that the points are records rather than people? Because the conceptual stakes of the CRC 1604 turn on exactly this distinction. Our research program proceeds from the premise that migration is socially produced rather than naturally given, and it borrows Durkheim’s fait social to treat migration, once produced, as a real social fact with effects beyond any actor’s intention.11 It speaks deliberately of production rather than mere construction: it is not only that ideas about migration are socially shaped, but that the reality itself is practically brought about, through apparatuses, procedures, and concrete administrative work. Migration, in this account, is produced through three coupled media: figures (the categories and types through which people are sorted), infrastructures, and spaces.
This is where all three media converge. The Ausländermeldekartei is a data infrastructure, an institutional and material arrangement that enables and constrains action, and at the same time a machine for producing figures, the condensed and socially effective categories through which people are addressed and sorted. It records one figure above all, the ‘Ausländer’, and it records it spatially: the registered are fixed to addresses and tracked through the recorded categories of movement and dwelling, so that the index composes the city itself as a sorted space. Figure, infrastructure, and space meet on a single card. The category ‘Ausländer’ is the clearest case. As the project team noted, it functions only within the logic of the nation-state, by setting the foreigner against the citizen; migration thereby becomes a category of difference, a marker of belonging and non-belonging.12
The index does not find foreigners in the world and record them. It is one of the instruments through which ‘the foreigner’ is made administrable in the first place. What we find on the cards are process-generated categories: in Rogers Brubaker’s terms, categories of practice, the working labels administrators use to sort people, rather than categories of analysis, the neutral concepts a scholar would choose. They are bureaucratically produced labels of the kind Roger Zetter described for ‘refugee’, and they operate, as Martina Tazzioli puts it, through a politics of counting.13
The history of one word shows how far this reaches. The term ‘guest worker’ (Gastarbeiter) is, as I have argued elsewhere, no innocent word.14Max Weber used the term in the 1921 volume Hinduismus und Buddhismus of his Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, and may even have introduced it into German scholarly usage, though the attribution is a cautious one; the idea he attached to it was an impossibility of belonging founded on ‘foreignness’.15 By around 1940 the term had settled into the vocabulary of the National Socialist labor deployment, alongside ‘foreign worker’ and ‘Eastern worker’, as a racialized category of difference. The Osnabrück index registered the people these words were used to sort. To animate the index is therefore to animate a vocabulary, and the points that arrive after 1955 carry a label with a long and compromised past.
The trouble with migration maps
A register of movement invites an obvious visual form: arrows from there to here, flows scaled by volume, a choropleth of origins. That form is a trap. Henk van Houtum and Rodrigo Bueno Lacy have shown how the conventional ‘invasion arrow’ of migration cartography slides from a neutral sign for movement into the iconography of military invasion, composing a threat where it claims only to describe.16 The straight, smooth, unidirectional arrow assumes a single destination and erases the lived geography and the broken time of actual journeys. The point predates the migration debate. In J. B. Harley’s deconstruction, the map is never a neutral mirror: its rules of objectivity are themselves an exercise of power-knowledge, and the silences of a map are as eloquent as its marks.17
The most influential modern migration graphic, the circular flow plot that Abel and Sander published in 2014, is elegant and widely imitated, and it is exactly the template one might lay over the Osnabrück data.18 Yet a chord, a band linking two points on the ring, or an arrow between two places, states a magnitude and a direction while saying nothing true about the path, and it converts an estimate or an administrative tally into a clean, authoritative band. At the same time, the danger for a registration index is specific. Its fields — nationality, occupation, reason for residence — look like hard facts; rendered as flows, they would harden further into a picture of migration as such when they are, in fact, the output of one office’s classifying work.
Designing against the arrow
The animation addresses these objections in its construction rather than in a caption, which is what makes it an argument rather than an illustration. It draws no lines. Movement appears only as points that fly and fade, so that the image never resolves into the false authority of a vector. What looks like density is the superimposition of many resting points, and density measures the frequency of documentation, not historical reality: a bright corridor means a path that was often recorded by an office under a regime of registration. Johanna Drucker’s distinction is the right one here. These are not data, Latin for ‘the given’, but capta, ‘the taken’: constructed, partial, the product of an act of observation, and a humanistic visualization should carry that constructedness rather than smooth it away.19
Two further choices follow the same logic. The index data available to us ends around 1980, which means that people who left afterward have not had a recorded departure and remain forever ‘present’ in the research dataset: the occupancy field fills up toward the end and never empties. The animation does not correct this artifact, the statistician’s right-censoring, a record cut off before its end, into a tidier curve. It shows the effect and marks it on screen from 1979, because the silence of the source is part of what the source is. And the points stay anonymous. The internal person identifier never leaves the project; only an anonymized movement identifier enters the image, and the animation deliberately declines to reproduce the individual visibility that the registration apparatus was built to achieve. Whose categories are being shown, and who is rendered (in)visible by them, are not incidental questions, as Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein have argued for data work in general.20 One quarter of the registered persons have no clear region of origin; rather than forcing them into a category, the animation lets them remain dimmed and unresolved.
What becomes visible, and what does not
Within these limits, the moving image makes patterns legible that a table holds only in latent form. Arrivals are dominated by southern Europe throughout the period, with a pronounced peak in 1970, the year of some 4,250 recorded arrivals. The net balance of arrivals over departures runs positive through the boom years and then turns negative in the recession years of 1966–67 and again in 1975, the very years West German recruitment collapsed. Recorded departures swell as the economy contracts: the cyclical steering of labor migration leaves its mark in the registrations themselves. A composition view sharpens the same story into a number. A diversity index, on a scale where 1.0 means many origins evenly mixed and 0 a single dominant group, stands near 0.90 in the early, mixed years, falls to about 0.72 in 1973 as Spanish southern-European dominance concentrates in the inner city, and recovers to about 0.82 by 1980 as Turkish and Yugoslav arrivals re-diversify the picture; in the dense core, orange mixes into red, a handover made visible.
Migrants moving through the collective housing facility at Weidenstraße 15.
The clearest structural finding concerns how movement inside the city was organized. Intra-urban moves are not diffuse. They are channeled through a few dormitory nodes, the guest-worker residences of the Karmann car factory, and the network analysis identifies the Bohmter Straße 52 as the dominant bridge, a single node through which a disproportionate share of moves passed.
The Weidenstraße 15 (see animation above), the largest of these residences, is the clearest case, and a companion animation follows this single address. In the event model, 4,979 people passed through it, of whom 4,154, more than eight in ten, had their prior registered residence in Spain, above all in Madrid, Valencia, Andalusia, and the small towns of Extremadura; the animation turns this into a visible rhythm, points streaming in from that recruitment geography, gathering at the one address, and then dispersing. It was not a place to live but a place to pass through, an entrance and a junction: of those who moved on, roughly 1,460 stayed in Osnabrück, first in the other Karmann dormitories and then in private flats across the city, while 1,045 returned to Spain and some 1,294 went elsewhere in Germany. It is the guest-worker system in miniature. Its designers intended a rotation, labor that would arrive, work, and leave again, and the building was the architecture of that intention. The dispersal, however, tells another story: the step from the dormitory into the city’s ordinary housing is the quiet beginning of settlement, of the families and futures the rotation principle was meant to prevent, and what the register caught at this address was therefore not transience as such but its conversion into residence, even as the label ‘guest worker’ traveled on with them. The same wave can be watched across the whole city, building and then dissolving, Spanish around 1964, then Turkish in the Südstraße and the Konrad-Adenauer-Ring from 1972–73, a density that migrates through the streets and changes color as it goes.
The “Wohnheim” in Weidenstraße 15 as “Gate” to the city? (Visualization: crass)
A second animation sets this case against another, and the comparison is the argument. The Osningstraße, in the Schölerberg quarter, was also a Karmann address, and its dormitory at number 18 housed a comparable, albeit smaller core of Spanish metalworkers passing through; the median stay there, about eleven months, is all but identical to that of the Weidenstraße. By the measure the register makes easiest, duration, the two streets are twins. Yet the Osningstraße (see animation below) is two worlds in one street. Alongside the company dormitory ran a fabric of private tenancies, and through it moved a more mixed population, Spanish but also Portuguese and Yugoslav and, from the early 1970s, increasingly Turkish, with a markedly higher share of women. Here the cards record what the Weidenstraße almost never shows: across the street, some 139 families and 306 children, nearly a quarter of them born in Osnabrück, and a wave of children registered ‘with their parents’ that swells precisely after the recruitment stop of 1973. The same eleven-month rotation, in other words, housed two different futures. At the Weidenstraße it stayed rotation; in the Osningstraße, which will be the subject of one of my coming case studies, it began, quietly, to become settlement, a “second generation” entering the register as foreigners in the city of their birth. The comparison shows what a single figure cannot: that identical administrative durations can hold entirely different social processes, and that the index marks the difference only at its margins, in an entry of ‘Hausfrau’ against an occupation, in a child whose address is given as its parents’.
Mobility profile of the Osningstraße (Visualization: crass).
What the image cannot show is as important as what it can, and its limit is a legal category, not a place. The index holds only those who, at a given moment, lacked German citizenship, and people leave it by changing category as much as by moving away. Naturalization is the clearest case: a registered ‘Spaniard’ who was naturalized became, in the register, a ‘German’ and simply dropped out of the data, without changing address. The gendered citizenship law of the period drew the same line in its own way: until 1953, a foreign woman who married a German man acquired German nationality automatically, and vanished from the index without moving a step. The boundary even ran against birth and descent: before the reform of 1975, a child born in Osnabrück to a German mother and a foreign father was a foreigner too, and so entered the index, not as an absence but as a record. Whether any of this changed how a person was seen on the street, whether the naturalized ‘Spaniard’ stopped being a ‘Spaniard’ to her neighbors, is another question, and one the register cannot answer. Foreign origins, in any case, resolve only to the country, never to the town, and nothing exists after 1980. The animation is, ultimately, a portrait of a registration practice and its reach, complete with the practice’s own blind spots.
The visualization as production
The reflexive consequence is unavoidable, and it should be stated rather than hidden. An analysis of this kind stands inside the process it depicts. To geocode, to assign a region, to color a point by nationality is to extend the classifying work of the office whose cards we are reading, and the scholarship that studies the production of migration also, in a small way, takes part in it. This is why the design choices are not cosmetic: a responsible visualization of an administrative register is one that keeps its own operations visible. The companion argument about large-scale digitization and the silences of the archive, developed for the Paris keynote and published separately on this blog, addresses the same problem from the methodological side.21
You may find this animation beautiful, and the beauty is precisely the risk. What looks like a city breathing, alive with diversity, is a city producing it. The light dots are not people arriving. They are a city learning to write down who it would call a foreigner.
Notes
Sebastian Bondzio, Linda Ennen-Lange, Lukas Hennies, Sebastian Huhn, Max Pochadt, Christoph Rass and Janine Wasmuth, “Die Osnabrücker Ausländermeldekartei 1930–1980. Potenziale als Quelle der Stadt- und Migrationsgeschichte,” Osnabrücker Mitteilungen 126 (2021): 137–193. The paper frames the 1939–1945 entries as the National Socialist forced-labor system and the post-war registrations as displaced persons and “homeless foreigners,” the aftermath of a “gewaltinduzierte[n] Mobilität.” On the latter, see also Lukas Hennies, Sebastian Huhn and Christoph Rass, “Gewaltinduzierte Mobilität und ihre Folgen: ‘Displaced Persons’ in Osnabrück und die Flüchtlingskrise nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg,” Osnabrücker Mitteilungen 123 (2018): 183–232. ↩
Christoph Rass, “Staatsverträge und ›Gastarbeiter‹ im Migrationsregime des ›Dritten Reiches‹. Motive, Intentionen und Kontinuitäten,” in Jochen Oltmer, ed., Nationalsozialistisches Migrationsregime und ›Volksgemeinschaft‹ (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2012), 159–183, DOI 10.30965/9783657773343_010. The Third Reich used bilateral treaties and the euphemism ›Gastarbeiter‹ to cast its wartime deployment of foreign workers as regulated labor migration, even as their treatment converged on that of forced laborers. ↩
Max Galka, “Here’s Everyone Who’s Immigrated to the U.S. Since 1820,” Metrocosm (blog), 3 May 2016, metrocosm.com/animated-immigration-map (archived 16 December 2016: Wayback Machine); Will Geary, “TransitFlow,” 2017. On the circular migration diagram: Guy J. Abel and Nikola Sander, “Quantifying Global International Migration Flows,” Science 343, no. 6178 (2014): 1520–1522, DOI 10.1126/science.1248676. ↩
Bondzio et al., Ausländermeldekartei (2021), on the number of cards (some 56,613) and persons (around 70,000) and on its standing as the first machine-readable mass card index of its kind. ↩
Ibid. Figures from the digitized dataset for the operating period 1930–1980: 66,111 arrivals, 51,421 departures, 99,264 changes of address, 10,720 addresses. ↩
Janine Wasmuth and Christoph Rass, “Die Osnabrücker Ausländermeldekartei. Vom Karteigut zum Forschungsdatensatz,” Archiv-Nachrichten Niedersachsen 27 (2023): 42–61. On the extraction with omni:us, the relational database and the geocoding. ↩
Sebastian Bondzio and Christoph Rass, “Allmächtig, allwissend und allgegenwärtig? Die Osnabrücker Gestapo-Kartei als Massendatenspeicher und Weltmodell,” Osnabrücker Mitteilungen 124 (2019): 223–260. ↩
Sebastian Bondzio and Christoph Rass, “Big Data und die Digitalisierung von Geschichte und Geschichtswissenschaft,” in Stiftung niedersächsische Gedenkstätten, Jahresbericht 2021 (Celle, 2022), 16–21; Christoph Rass and Sebastian Bondzio, “Next Stop Big Data? Erfahrungen mit der Digitalisierung von Geschichte und Geschichtswissenschaft,” in Paul Thomes and Tobias Drewes, eds., Vergangenheit analysieren – Zukunft gestalten, Aachener Studien zur Wirtschafts-, Sozial- und Technologiegeschichte 20, Düren: Shaker, 2020, 13–50). In the original: data “repräsentieren niemals ein objektives, d. h. ein beobachterunabhängiges Weltmodell” (never represent an objective, i.e. observer-independent, world model). ↩
Bondzio et al., Ausländermeldekartei (2021), the case studies by Pochadt, Ennen-Lange, Hennies and Wasmuth. ↩
Max Pochadt, Christoph Rass and Janine Wasmuth, “Migration aus Spanien nach Osnabrück zwischen 1960 und 1980 im Spiegel der Osnabrücker Ausländermeldekartei: Mobilität, Ankunft und Sozialprofil,” Osnabrücker Mitteilungen 128 (2023): 295–322. ↩
Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 1604 “Produktion von Migration”, University of Osnabrück (funded by the German Research Foundation, DFG). The premises summarized here — production rather than construction, and the triad of figure, infrastructure and space — follow the CRC’s research program. ↩
Bondzio et al., Ausländermeldekartei (2021), on the category ‘Ausländer’ as a category of difference within the logic of the nation-state. ↩
Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge, MA, 2004), on categories of practice versus categories of analysis; Roger Zetter, “Labelling Refugees: Forming and Transforming a Bureaucratic Identity,” Journal of Refugee Studies 4, no. 1 (1991): 39–62, DOI 10.1093/jrs/4.1.39; Martina Tazzioli, “Assembling traces of border violence. Counter-mapping as counter-archiving,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (2025), DOI 10.1177/02637758241303367 (on the “politics of counting”). ↩
Christoph Rass, “‘Gastarbeiter’. Zur Geschichte eines Schlüsselbegriffs der Produktion von Migration,” NGHM@UOS (blog), 14 June 2020, DOI 10.58079/sbwd. ↩
Ibid.; quoted there from Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (Hinduismus und Buddhismus), Tübingen 1921, 126 f. Rass states the attribution cautiously (“scheint … eingeführt zu haben,” “vielleicht geprägt”: seems to have introduced it, perhaps coined it). ↩
Henk van Houtum and Rodrigo Bueno Lacy, “The migration map trap. On the invasion arrows in the cartography of migration,” Mobilities 15, no. 2 (2020): 196–219 (online 2019), DOI 10.1080/17450101.2019.1676031. ↩
J. B. Harley, “Deconstructing the Map,” Cartographica 26, no. 2 (1989): 1–20, DOI 10.3138/E635-7827-1757-9T53. ↩
Abel and Sander, “Quantifying Global International Migration Flows” (2014). ↩
Johanna Drucker, “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 5, no. 1 (2011); ead., Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Cambridge, MA, 2014; metaLABprojects). ↩
Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, Data Feminism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020). ↩
Das jüngste Tiny-Desk-Kolloquium der Professur für Neueste Geschichte und Historische Migrationsforschung versammelte unter Leitung von Dr. Sebastian Musch fünf Beiträge, die von der westdeutschen Nachkriegsjustiz über die digitale Public History bis zur Geschichtspolitik internationaler Organisationen reichten. Trotz ihrer thematischen Heterogenität teilten die Beiträge ein gemeinsames Interesse: die Frage, wie Kategorien, Narrative und Zuschreibungen historisch hergestellt werden.
Einmal in jedem Semester bietet die Professur für Neueste Geschichte und Historische Migrationsforschung mit diesem Format die Gelegenheit, Abschlussarbeiten, Forschungsperspektiven und Projekte vorzustellen und zu diskutieren. Das TDK-Format führt dabei fünf bis sechs Referent:innen zu 15-minütigen Kurzvorträgen mit knapper Fragerunde zusammen, die ganze Veranstaltung dauert weniger als drei Stunden.
Glaubwürdigkeit und die Kategorie »kriminell« in NS-Prozessen
(Foto: Jessica Wehner)
Im ersten Vortrag stellte Lennart Blömer Befunde aus seiner Bachelorarbeit vor, in der er ein Verfahren der westdeutschen Nachkriegsjustiz zum Strafvollzug im Nationalsozialismus untersuchte. Dabei rückte er die prozessuale Konstruktion von Glaubwürdigkeit in den Mittelpunkt: Glaubwürdigkeit, so der Befund, wurde systematisch demjenigen zugeschrieben, dessen Aussage das gewünschte Narrativ stützte. Der Fall fügt sich in das strukturelle Problem der »wilden Urteile« der frühen Bundesrepublik ein, ohne dass sich daraus eine generelle Aussage über den strategischen Einsatz von Zeugenaussagen in NS-Prozessen ableiten ließe. Die Untersuchung arbeitete zugleich heraus, wie stark die Zuschreibung »kriminell« von unterschiedlichen rechtlichen und zeitlichen Kontexten abhing, etwa der Kategorie des »Berufsverbrechers« nach dem Gewohnheitsverbrechergesetz von 1934, und verwies auf weitere Verfahren zur Strafanstalt Celle als Anschlussperspektive.
In der Diskussion wurde die Ausdifferenzierung des Kriminalitätsbegriffs vertieft, ebenso die Frage nach Klasse und sozialer Stigmatisierung; deutlich wurde dabei, dass die nach dem Gewohnheitsverbrechergesetz Inhaftierten bis heute nicht als NS-Opfer anerkannt sind.
Die digitale Ausstellung zum Vareler »Altersheim« für Displaced Persons
(Foto: Jessica Wehner)
Stellvertretend für eine Gruppe von Studierenden der Universität Osnabrück stellten im Anschluss Lea Horstmann und Jannik Singer die im April eröffnete digitale Ausstellung zum größten europäischen »Altersheim« für Displaced Persons vor, das zwischen 1950 und 1959 auf einem ehemaligen Kasernengelände in Varel bestand und aus einem über mehrere Semester angelegten Projektseminar von Dr. Sebastian Huhn in Kooperation mit dem Lothar-Meyer-Gymnasium in Varel hervorging. Im Zentrum standen weniger der Inhalt der Ausstellung als das »Making of«: die systematische Digitalisierung und Auswertung der im Archiv des Heimatvereins verwahrten Meldekartei mit über 1.450 Personen, die redaktionelle Zusammenführung sehr heterogener Texte von Studierenden und Schüler:innen sowie die Möglichkeiten, die das digitale Format gegenüber einer klassischen Ausstellung eröffnet: geringe Kosten, permanente Korrigierbarkeit und Erweiterbarkeit. Vorgestellt wurde auch eine im Kontext einer Digital-History-Übung entstandene WebApp, die die Geburtsorte und Migrationswege der Bewohner:innen auf einer animierten Karte visualisiert und so die Datengrundlage zugänglich macht.
Die Diskussion kreiste um den schmalen Grat zwischen quellengetreuer Genauigkeit und ansprechender Vermittlung, insbesondere bei der Kartendarstellung, die Zwischenstationen der Verfolgung notwendig vereinfacht, sowie um Fragen des Datenschutzes, die durch die Publikation der Namen in den Arolsen Archives teilweise vorentschieden waren.
Displaced Persons als Studierende an der Universität Göttingen
(Foto: Jessica Wehner)
Dr. Maria Rhode (Universität Göttingen) präsentierte im ersten wissenschaftlichen Vortrag unter dem Titel »Unter besonderen Bedingungen« Ergebnisse eines Ausstellungsprojekts zu Displaced Persons, die ab 1945 in Göttingen studierten. Die besondere Quellengrundlage bildet die Questur der Universität, die die DP-Studierenden ab dem Sommersemester 1946 gesondert verzeichnete, sodass sich rund 460 Studierende mit DP-Status rekonstruieren lassen, deren nationale Zusammensetzung, Fächerwahl und Wohnsituation Rode differenziert nachzeichnete. Sie betonte die semantische Trennung zwischen der empathisch besetzten deutschen »Vertreibungsgeschichte« und der lange marginalisierten DP-Geschichte und plädierte dafür, Überlieferungslücken explizit zu machen, statt sie zu übergehen.
In der Diskussion wurde auf die Übereinstimmung der nationalen Verteilung mit den von Henning Borggräfe für die IRO nachgewiesenen Mustern hingewiesen sowie auf ergänzende Bestände wie die Review-Board-Files, die Personen an den Rändern des DP-Status sichtbar machen.
Das Frankfurter Amt für multikulturelle Angelegenheiten
(Foto: Jessica Wehner)
Dr. David Templin (SFB 1604, Teilprojekt C1) verschob den Fokus ins späte 20. Jahrhundert und stellte eine Fallstudie zum 1989 gegründeten Frankfurter Amt für multikulturelle Angelegenheiten (AMkA) vor, verortet in der Frage nach der Bedeutung der kommunalen Ebene für die Entwicklung lokaler Migrations- und Integrationspolitiken. Templin skizzierte die »eigentümlich breite Koalition« der Multikulturalismus-Debatte, ordnete das AMkA zwischen Anerkennungspolitik, Kulturalisierung und Symbolpolitik ein und zeigte anhand des Quellenmaterials, wie das Amt über bilaterale Kontakte, bundesweite Vernetzung mit Ausländerbeauftragten und eine europäische Konferenz von 1991 versuchte, ein Gegengewicht zur restriktiven Bundespolitik zu bilden, während sich seine Kompetenzen in der kommunalen Praxis als begrenzt erwiesen.
Die Diskussion fragte nach der Semantik der Benennung als »Amt« im Unterschied zum »Zentrum«, nach dem Verhältnis von Wissenschaft und Aktivismus in der Begriffsprägung sowie nach der linken Kritik am Multikulturalismus, die vor allem dessen kulturalisierende Ausblendung struktureller Ungleichheit ins Visier nahm.
Das »gefährliche Archiv«: die verhinderte Geschichte der IRO
(Foto: Jessica Wehner)
Dr. Sebastian Huhn stellte abschließend eine gemeinsam mit Christoph Rass entwickelte Projektskizze zum Gründungsnarrativ des modernen internationalen Flüchtlingsregimes vor. Ausgangspunkt ist ein bemerkenswerter Befund aus den IRO-Beständen der Archives nationales in Paris: Die zunächst von der History Unit erarbeitete offizielle, bereits bei Oxford University Press zugesagte dreibändige Geschichte der IRO wurde 1953 auf Einspruch der USA hin gestoppt, das Team entlassen und die Aufgabe an Louise Holborn übertragen, deren 1956 erschienenes Werk seither als unhinterfragtes Referenzwerk fungiert. Mit Michel-Rolph Trouillot deutete Huhn diesen Vorgang als »Silencing of the Past« in Reinform und hob hervor, dass mit dem unveröffentlichten Hacking-Manuskript eine verhinderte Gegenerzählung für einen quellenkritischen Vergleich vorliegt.
Die Diskussion verband dies mit korpuslinguistischen Verfahren des Textvergleichs, mit denen sich Fortschreibungen, Umdeutungen und Auslassungen zwischen den Versionen systematisch nachweisen lassen, und richtete den Blick auf die noch offene Frage nach Warrens eigentlichen Motiven sowie auf die auffällige Semantik der Buchtitel zwischen geschichtswissenschaftlichem Anspruch und Rechenschaftsbericht.
Die Organisator:innen und Referent:innen des sechsten Tiny Desk Kolloquiums (v.l.n.r.: Lennart Blömer, Christoph Rass & Jessica Wehner (Organisation), David Templin, Maria Rhode, Sebastian Musch (Moderation) und Sebastian Huhn, es fehlen Lea Horstmann und Jannik Singer) (Foto: Annika Heyen)
Zur nächsten Ausgabe des Tiny Desk Kolloquiums laden wir Ende des Wintersemesters 2026/2027 ein!
Lässt sich ein Jahrhundert, das man selbst durchlebt hat, mit den Mitteln der Geschichtsschreibung fassen, und wenn ja, um welchen Preis? Eric J. Hobsbawms The Age of Extremes. The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991, der neuteTitel der NGHM-Leseliste aus dem Feld Globalgeschichte und Sozialgeschichte, beantwortet diese Frage mit einer Periodisierung, die Schule gemacht hat, und einer pessimistischen Diagnose, die bis heute Widerspruch hervorruft.
Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm (1917–2012), britischer Historiker und Autor von The Age of Extremes (Quelle: Wikimedia Commons / Wikipedia).
Als Hobsbawm 1994 bei Michael Joseph in London den Schlussband seiner Tetralogie zur Geschichte des langen 19. und kurzen 20. Jahrhunderts vorlegte, war er Mitte siebzig. 1936 war er als Student in Cambridge der Communist Party of Great Britain beigetreten, 1991, beim Ende der Partei, ließ er die Mitgliedschaft halbherzig erlöschen. Drei Jahre später erschien das Buch, dessen letztes Kapitel die Bilanz des ›Realen Sozialismus‹ enthält. Niall Ferguson, dessen politische Position weit von Hobsbawm entfernt ist, hat die Tetralogie als beste Einführung in die moderne Weltgeschichte in englischer Sprache bezeichnet, eine Würdigung, die zeigt, wie weit die Leserschaft des Werks ihre disziplinären und ideologischen Grenzen längst überschritten hat.
Die Architektur des Buches ist streng. Auf ein einleitendes Überblickskapitel folgen drei Teile: ›The Age of Catastrophe‹ für die Jahre 1914 bis 1950, ›The Golden Age‹ für die Jahre 1950 bis 1973 und ›The Landslide‹ für die Zeit von 1973 bis 1991. Die neunzehn Kapitel sind weitgehend eigenständig komponiert und behandeln den totalen Krieg, die Russische Revolution, die Weltwirtschaftskrise, das Ende des Liberalismus und den Aufstieg der Diktaturen, die Anti-Faschismus-Allianz, die Dekolonisation, das Goldene Zeitalter, die Krise der 1970er Jahre und das Ende des ›Realen Sozialismus‹. Eigene Kapitel zu Kunst, Kultur und Naturwissenschaften erweitern den Zugriff über eine Politik- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte hinaus.
Hobsbawm schreibt keine Ereignisgeschichte. Vielmehr will er drei große Veränderungen seiner Lebenszeit erklären: den Niedergang europäischer Vormacht, die Verwandlung der Welt in eine ›einzige operative Einheit‹ durch die Revolution in Kommunikation und Transport sowie den Zerfall früherer sozialer Beziehungsmuster. Aus dieser Trias entwickelt sich eine globale Erzählung, in der die Krise ab den frühen 1970er Jahren nicht bloß als ökonomisches Phänomen erscheint, sondern als Erschütterung der institutionellen und ideologischen Grundlagen aller Regime. Im Schlusskapitel diagnostiziert Hobsbawm einen Verlust an staatlicher Steuerungsfähigkeit. Damit kündigt er nicht den Triumph des demokratischen Kapitalismus an, den die zeitgenössische Publizistik nach 1989 ausrief, sondern eine drohende Anarchie. In seiner Analyse der Russischen Revolution formuliert er pointiert, dass der Kapitalismus sich an seinen Rändern leichter überwinden ließ als in seinen Stammländern: eine Spannung, in der das ganze Werk seine Position hält, nämlich die Anerkennung der Stabilität des Kapitalismus dort, wo der Marxist Hobsbawm ihn am liebsten überwunden gesehen hätte.
Genau hier setzt die Kontroverse an, die das Buch bis heute begleitet. Lawrence Freedman würdigte in seiner Rezension Hobsbawms umfassende Analyse und seinen weiten Bogen und erklärte den Band zum Maßstab für Darstellungen des 20. Jahrhunderts. Zugleich hielt er Hobsbawms Sicht auf den Kapitalismus als unbändige und intrinsisch extremistische Kraft sowie seine Sorge vor einer triumphierenden Anarchie für nicht überzeugend. Auch die Etiketten der Periodisierung stießen in der Rezeption auf Vorbehalte: Die Zeit nach 1973 als ›Landslide‹ zu beschreiben, als seien die Dinge seitdem stetig bergab gerollt, erschien mehreren Kritikern kaum überzeugend – Tony Judt überschrieb seine Besprechung nicht zufällig mit ›Downhill All the Way‹. Die durchgängig unsympathische Behandlung der USA führe, so Freedman, zu einem unzureichenden Verständnis der globalen Anziehungskraft des ›American way‹. Eine andere Kritiklinie betrifft die Quellenbasis: Das Buch stützt sich fast ausschließlich auf Sekundärliteratur, deren Grenzen gelegentlich sichtbar werden, und der Raum, den Hobsbawm dem Sozialismus einräumt, lässt eigene Voreingenommenheiten erkennen. Von links wiederum las die Internationalist Communist Review das Buch als Ausdruck einer Wandlung Hobsbawms vom Stalinisten zum Verteidiger ›demokratischer Werte‹: ein Vorwurf aus entgegengesetzter Richtung.
Zu finden in der UB UOS. Signatur 4595-484 9.
Trotz dieser Vorbehalte ist die zentrale Setzung des Buches in das Vokabular der Globalgeschichte eingegangen. Mit dem ›kurzen 20. Jahrhundert‹, als Pendant zum ›langen 19. Jahrhundert‹, hat Hobsbawm eine bis heute prägende Periodisierung etabliert. Die Dreiteilung in Katastrophe, Goldenes Zeitalter und Landslide strukturiert die Erzählung der Epoche weit über das eigene Werk hinaus. Wer die Geschichte des Westens nicht mehr aus sich selbst heraus, sondern in den ungleichen Schüben von Kapitalismus und Klassenbildung sowie in der Wucht des Nationalismus erzählen will, kann hinter diesen Zugriff kaum zurück.
An einer Stelle bleibt das Buch dabei eigentümlich blass: Migration. Hobsbawm registriert die Verwandlung der Welt in eine ›einzige operative Einheit‹, ohne die Bewegungen von Menschen, also Vertreibungen, Arbeitsmigrationen, Fluchten, Displaced Persons der Nachkriegszeit, als eigenständigen Strang seiner Erzählung zu führen. Mit Wymans DPs, dem ersten Titel zur Flüchtlingsgeschichte auf unserer Liste, wird sichtbar, was bei Hobsbawm strukturell unterbelichtet bleibt: dass die Produktion von Migrationsregimen kein Nebenphänomen des kurzen 20. Jahrhunderts war, sondern einer seiner Kernprozesse.
Was bleibt, ist eine Periodisierung, die ihr eigenes Datum trägt: 1991 als Endpunkt, geschrieben von einem Historiker, der diesen Endpunkt selbst als Zäsur seiner politischen Biografie erlebt hatte.
Osnabrücker Studierende finden Hobsbawms The Age of Extremes im B-Freihand-Magazin unter der Signatur 4595-484 9 (OPAC).
Eric J. Hobsbawm (1917–2012), The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991, London: Michael Joseph 1994.
Dieser Beitrag gehört zur Reihe NGHM liest, in der die 65 Titel der NGHM-Leseliste vorgestellt werden. Die Liste kann als Wissensgraph erkundet werden.
This essay presents a shortened, reworked version of the keynote lecture given at the summer university ‘Doing Migration History with Digital Methods’, held at the German Historical Institute Paris (DHIP / Institut historique allemand) and organized by Dr. Mareike König, deputy director of the DHIP, together with the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH, University of Luxembourg), 22–26 June 2026. The keynote was delivered on the evening of Thursday 25 June and was chaired by Prof. Dr. Machteld Venken (C²DH, University of Luxembourg), one of the summer university’s organizers.
Conference impressions
The Summer-University week – in which I participated from the 24th of June – moved through the digital methods now reshaping migration history. After Lorella Viola’s opening keynote on mapping migrant worlds, the sessions ranged across geographic information systems and spatial analysis, optical-character and handwritten-text recognition, the modeling of migration through textual data, datafication and migration databases, and digital network analysis, with hands-on workshops from QGIS mapping to LLM-assisted workflows. One question ran through all of it: what a digital approach opens, and what it closes, in matters of bias, interpretation, and the limits of the method. The contributions were, for the most part, doctoral projects, each presented to the summer university, commented on by an expert, and discussed by the group.
Participants of the DHIT-Summer-University 2026 (Photo: Rass)
On Friday, I chaired the first session on digital network analysis, where Alexandre Binoux (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne / École française de Rome) read the eighteenth-century Greek colony of Corsica by turning parish registers and letters into networks, and Jorit Jens Hopp (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, ERC project T-MIGRANTS) traced the professional networks of German-language theatre people in the nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire.
Two further papers given in Thursday’s sessions stayed with me in particular: Timur Mitrofanov (University of Heidelberg / Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe) read the English-language press of the Latvian diaspora, some 7,270 articles across twenty-five titles, through topic modelling and named-entity recognition; and Valentin Rhodius (Université de Caen Normandie) built a database of the maritime crossings the International Refugee Organization organised between 1946 and 1952, more than 1,200 voyages that carried close to 700,000 of post-war Europe’s displaced overseas. Both connect directly to research lines pursued in our own NGHM working group (Neueste Geschichte und Historische Migrationsforschung) in Osnabrück.
The essay that follows reworks my own keynote, delivered on the Thursday evening: shortened, with the questions raised in the discussion folded into the argument and gathered again at the close.1
How Migration Became Data, How Data Makes Meaning, and How Reflexive Migration Research Intervenes
by Christoph Rass
On 13 February 1905, Tullio and Theresa Beltrami, who had come from Italy, moved into a flat in a workers’ district of Osnabrück.2 They stayed. Two daughters were born in the city, in 1909 and 1913: a second generation before the First World War. And yet, under the principle of ius sanguinis, those daughters were Italian, not German, born in Osnabrück and made foreign by descent. From 1916, the family lived as nationals of a state at war with the German Reich, classified as ‘enemy aliens’ on a street where they had already belonged for a decade.
This family is not to be found in a single coherent document. They left almost no trace of their own. They survive in the municipal foreigners’ registration index, a card file created in an administrative reform at the close of the 1920s, when the most advanced information technology of the day reached general administration. We reconstruct the Beltramis as a trajectory across that index: by reading handwritten entries and by record linkage, the matching of scattered cards into one family’s path.
This is the first thing worth noticing: the index did not record the Beltramis, it made them. So we read the “Ausländermeldekartei” twice: as a source for their lives, and as a source for the act that registered those lives. The friction between the two, between a biography and the grid that inscribes it, is what makes the file legible as an archive of its own categorical work.
Migration became data long before it became digital. Markus Krajewski has shown that the card index was already a data-processing machine; what our instruments add today is scale and speed, not the operation itself.3 This essay takes up that double reading. It traces how a categorical figure is produced, assigned, and contested; it asks what the methods of digital history open and what they close; and it locates the silences of the data infrastructure, naming a fourth one that is new in kind. One commitment runs through all of it, stated here against the temptation to read the diagnosis as a counsel of despair: the same operation that produces a silence can be turned against it, and the same digitization that deepens a silence can also help to break it. The argument is not a verdict on digital history. It is an attempt to keep the method usable and honest at scale.
A figure and its trajectory
Widen the focus from one family to the drawer that holds it. The Osnabrück foreigners’ index records about 83,000 arrival entries for more than 70,000 people between 1881 and 1980, with adequate data quality for analysis from the late 1930s onward.4 Across that period the same printed form runs through five different populations: the late Weimar administration that begins the file; the National Socialist state that turns it to the administration of forced labour; the British occupation that registers ‘displaced persons’; the Federal Republic that fills it, through the recruitment decades, with Spanish, Italian, Turkish, and Portuguese ‘guest workers’; and, after the recruitment ban of 1973, the children of family reunification, thousands of them born in Osnabrück as ‘foreigners’ by descent, as the Beltrami daughters had been six decades earlier. The people changed. So did the clerks, and even some of the forms. The grid was the constant.
Prof. Dr. Christoph Rass @ DHIP (CC-BY 4.0 DHIP)
This is the wager of the Collaborative Research Center 1604 ‘Production of Migration’ in Osnabrück, where I work as one of the principal investigators, and the analytical position applied throughout is the one we have developed there.5 Migration is not the cause that explains social processes; it is their contested product. Human mobility is a fact. ‘Migration’ is a construct, and our object is the production of that construct, including by digital tools and, increasingly, with them. The word ‘production’ is chosen over ‘construction’ on purpose: construction points to language and discourse, production points to apparatuses, factors, and products, to the registration office as much as to the speech acts performed there. Migration, in Durkheim’s phrase, is treated as a social fact, something a society makes and then meets as if it were given; and the same may hold for the work of production itself.
Take the one word that organizes the index across decades, from the wartime years into the rise and decline of the West German ‘economic miracle’: ‘guest worker’, ‘Gastarbeiter’. It looks like a description of a labor-market arrangement. It is a sediment. Max Weber introduced the term in a context remote from labor migration;6the National Socialist regime then took it up in wartime propaganda, where it performed a semantic radicalization. It masked coercion as legitimate exchange, gave the forced-labor system a pseudo-legal veneer, and folded the ‘Ausländereinsatz’, the deployment of foreign labor, into a pan-European fiction. When the Federal Republic revived ‘Gastarbeiter’ in 1961 to replace ‘Fremdarbeiter’, a term seen as compromised by its National Socialist forced-labor associations, the older meanings carried over into the practices of recruitment and their registration routines. The word did not simply label the arrangement: it shaped it. ‘Gastarbeiter’ meant one thing above all: a temporary, segregated presence performing a social function, with no path to belonging.
Figures of migration do not stand still once produced. They acquire trajectories: they activate institutions, they address the people they name, and they are, at times, turned against their makers. What holds for the figures we inherit holds for the figures we make.
In the model my colleague Hajo Holst and I have been developing at CRC 1604, in the Center’s work on ‘figures of migration’, we see three forces at work, rarely in equal measure.7Institutionalization is the stabilizing pull of the apparatus: by 1955, when the Federal Republic signed its recruitment accord with Italy, more than two dozen instruments of regulated labor migration were already in force across Europe, each stabilizing a particular migration regime through the category it deployed. Subjectivation is the pressure of categorical address: a child first entered on a parent’s card as a dependent, a ‘Gastarbeiterkind’, then issued a card of its own at a first job, is handed a position before it can contest it. Transformation is the appropriation that rewrites a figure against its origin: Wir sind keine Gäste, we are no guests. With that slogan, immigrants demanded representation, fought deportation, and claimed equal treatment for their children at school and equal wages at work. The children of the recruited raised it in the 1970s and 1980s; the ‘third generation’ that followed them carries it still. Those produced by the call for ‘guest workers’ took the label and turned it into a claim to precisely what it had been built to deny. We watch that claim materialize in the index itself, as the first of those children crossed from the foreigners’ file into the residents’ register as naturalized citizens.
None of this is unique to migration. Ian Hacking described how classifications of people loop: the classified notice the category assigned to them, respond to it, and at times shift it in turn, so that human kinds become moving targets.8 The categorization is usually easy to spot; the contestation we have to detect with care. A figure is more than a classification: it carries a narrative and an image, a recognizable shape that takes part in the order it appears only to describe. The discipline of working with such figures is to register that twist, what Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star call ‘torque’, the way a life is wrenched as it is forced to fit a classification,9 rather than to reproduce it. The reach is wider than one word: the ‘displaced person’ of 1945, a category built by the international relief apparatus, came alive in the same way, and the mechanism extends to gender, race, class, and disability alike. What we call ‘migration’ here might be better caught, as Janine Dahinden proposes, by ‘migrantization’, the process by which people are made migrants in the first place.10
The ‘second generation’ returns at the threshold of the second part of this argument. The city-born children who the law still counted as foreign reappear in the 1970s as a statistical wave, exactly when West German migration studies begin to produce them as a figure. In the Osnabrück file, the number of registered minors peaks in 1973, at roughly 2,500 children; in 1974, the year after the recruitment ban, some 850 new children arrive in a single year, family reunification overrunning the political intention to halt and reverse migration; and the cohort reaching school age rises eightfold between 1955 and 1977. As their numbers grew, the city administration itself began to label these children ‘Gastarbeiterkinder’.11 The administrative file and the scholarly corpus emerging at the same time record the same child from two sides. That correspondence is the bridge to the digital methods themselves.
What digital methods open, and what they close
Every digital method brings a gain in what we can see at the price of something we must fix in place. Our own vocabulary has a word for the second half, Gestaltschließung: the pressure to resolve every ambiguity into a value, a category, a column. Three modes organize the digital history of migration, and each pays the same price in its own currency.
Mapping comes first because it is the most frequent of these operations. What a map opens seems real at once: geocode the Osnabrück addresses, and a segregated social topography appears at a glance. One address resolves into more than five thousand entries, overwhelmingly Spanish, a company-run ‘guest worker’ hostel on a site that had itself been a forced-labor camp between 1942 and 1945, rendered as a single point. What a map closes is the question of what, exactly, has been mapped. A migration map rarely shows where people were or how they moved; it shows where an administration recorded them, projected onto coordinates the source never had, with a precision that only looks exact. We plot what John Searle calls social facts, things that exist only because an institution recorded them, as if they were brute facts that had been there all along.12 Critical cartography has insisted since Brian Harley that a map is an argument, not a mirror, and Johanna Drucker reminds us that what we plot is never simply data but capta, something taken, not given. Henk van Houtum has shown how the innocent arrow on a migration map manufactures the very sense of invasion it claims to depict.13 The answer is not to stop mapping but to map provenance alongside position: to mark whether a point is a measurement, an administrative category, or an imagined place.
The second mode reads language, and here I write as one of the accused: in one strand of the Centre’s research we built a diachronic corpus of the discipline’s own writing on migration and education: roughly six thousand German-language texts from the 1960s to the 2010s, some forty-five million words in the cleaned working corpus.14 The corpus is not about migration research in the abstract but about migration research and the school system, about the making of the ‘migrant child’ as an object of knowledge. That research began in Germany at the moment those children appeared in the classrooms, a country unprepared for an arrival no one had forecast; it was, in a sense, the zero hour of German migration studies, called into being by a real problem at the school gates. We use the corpus to ask not whether the children labeled ‘Gastarbeiterkinder’ or ‘Ausländerkinder’ or ‘deficit children’ had language problems, but how the research discourse produced the ‘language problem’ as a fact. Run the literature through the pipeline, and two operations appear at once: the one that produces voice, and the one that produces silence. The concepts stay stable while the labels change. One finding is visible only at scale: the theorem of ‘double semilingualism’, the claim that a child raised in two languages masters neither, enters the German debate abruptly around 1979, imported from Scandinavia, and arrives bound to a single companion, the vocabulary of danger. The collocation tells us what the concept was for. It did not describe the children’s needs; it warned society about them. The deficit term almost never sits in a monolingual setting: no monolingual German child with a small vocabulary is ever called ‘semilingual’. The word does not measure competence. It marks belonging and reports the mark as a measurement. The corpus also carries a hopeful counter-finding: from the early 1990s the field begins to turn on itself, and the vocabulary of construction, ascription, and reflection rises steadily across the following decades.
The third mode models data; it drives the work of networks and databases. What it opens is relation and differentiation: the nationality-specific timing by which Spanish families crossed into a second generation earlier than Turkish or Portuguese ones, a pattern no card-by-card reading could find. What it closes is identity itself. Record linkage decides which two cards are one life; entity disambiguation decides which person a name denotes in the first place. These are not neutral operations: a wrong merge invents a biography that never existed, a wrong split hides one that did. José van Dijck calls datafication an ideology, and the power of a classification lies precisely in its invisibility.15 In the Osnabrück foreigner’s register, the post-war category ‘unclear nationality’ resolves the ambiguity of a whole displaced continent into a seemingly unambiguous value: unclear-Polish, 914; unclear-Yugoslav, 892; stateless, 506. The clerk, in each instance, had to choose a box, and so does the data schema. The remedy is not to refuse the model but to keep the choice legible: documented schemas, data statements, a source criticism of process-generated data carried unbroken into the database.
Migration of a silence?
Three modes, one finding each: every gain in differentiation is paid for in disambiguation; the more powerful and the easier the tool, the less visible the closure becomes. On the handwritten card the categorical decision stands in plain sight: nationality, status, occupation, written in fields open to challenge. In the relational dataset it moves into the schema, already less visible. In the language model it settles into weights and into the distribution of the training data, far harder to inspect. With the rise of model power, the site of categorical inscription migrates from the visible surface into the opaque interior. The bias has not necessarily grown. Its transparency has fallen.
That formulation drew the sharpest exchange of the discussion after my talk, and it is worth keeping open rather than resolving. One can object, with reason, that the model does not merely hide an old bias but adds a new layer of its own, so that the bias does grow. Both readings hold. Whether the added model layer means ‘more bias’ or ‘the same bias, buried deeper’ is a genuine conceptual question, and the reflexive point survives either answer: a distortion we can no longer see is harder to contest than one written in a clerk’s hand.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot located silencing at four moments in the production of history: the making of sources, the making of archives, the making of narratives, and the making of history in its retrospective significance.16 What I have not seen done, and what seems worth doing, is to ask where each of these moments now sits in a data infrastructure. The making of sources moves into data modelling: the decision about what can become a field, a value, a class at all. The making of archives doubles the older question of what enters the archive with a new one: what gets digitized, and how the metadata classify it; and, as Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star insist, every category valorizes one perspective and silences another.17 The making of narratives becomes the logic of ranking, indexing, and retrieval, the searchable shadow that Lara Putnam warned would make whatever has been digitized disproportionately visible.18 To read a source critically now means reading the whole pipeline that delivered it, not only the page at its end.
A fourth moment may be new in kind. It sits in the machine generalization of the large language model, where the distribution of the training data prejudges what can count as significant before the first question is asked. This is not a break with everything that came before. It is the same categorical operation, migrating one step further along a chain that runs from the clerk’s hand to the card index, from the card index to the relational database, and from the database into the trained model, carrying its silences at every step. Recent accounts tend to reach for the language of rupture, a paradigm break from archival mediation to opaque algorithms, yet without the historical depth that Trouillot, and Ann Laura Stoler’s work on the colonial archive, supply.19 Rupture, however, may be the wrong figure. What we are watching could also be read as a migration. Bias is the symptom; silencing, distributed across the moments of production, is the concept. And a migration can be made to run the other way: that is the reversal promised at the outset.
It helps to separate two debates that are usually run together. One is what large language models could do as a technology; the other is what the (commercial) models actually available to us do now. None of them is trained on historical sources, which is why they do not really read our sources and why they return curious explanations: the training data does not fit the purpose to which we put it. And their bias is not a separate machine defect set against an unbiased world. It is the reproduction of the bias already in the world, the same bias the archive has always reproduced from the time that made it. What we are trained to do with a biased source is exactly what a reflexive practice must learn to do with a model.
The reverse operation
If silence enters at four moments, a reflexive practice can answer at each. Where sources are made, we can model the ambiguity instead of resolving it away, and let ‘unclear nationality’ stand on the record as the open question it was. Where archives are made, handwritten-text recognition makes legible, at a scale no reading room ever allowed, what had been buried in undeciphered hands; and entity recognition can surface even a name that appears only once, a trace no index ever caught, as Mrinalini Luthra and colleagues have shown for the colonial archive.20 Where narratives are made, record linkage returns individuated lives from the categorical mass. The reason we now know the Beltramis by name across three generations is that these methods gave them back a trajectory rather than a type.
That recovery rested on the same fragile decisions warned against above. Every link in the Beltrami trajectory is a disambiguation that could have gone wrong, and a different choice would have given a different family. The categories are my data as much as the clerk’s: I counted the second generation through two definitions, and the two definitions yielded two different cohorts and two different images. This is unsilencing, and it is real, and it is not innocent, because to recover a life as data can re-objectify it, as Jessica Marie Johnson warns: every entity type and every linkage rule is itself a categorical decision.21 An unsilencing that knows it is also a kind of inscription: that is the discipline worth arguing for. Not refusal, and not blind faith, but a method turned against its own silences with eyes open.
The constructive task that follows is a research program, not a hope. It begins by relocating the question of confidence. Character recognition may, before long, become a solvable problem: given a controlled historical lexicon and a pass of human verification, domain-trained models already read difficult administrative hands at high accuracy, even on densely structured forms.22
The harder question lies one step further on. It is not whether the machine reads the character but whether the answer it then generates can travel back to its data points and carry a graded measure of its own certainty. That is the confidence score worth arguing about, and it sharpens at scale: forty or eighty thousand cards can still be checked, but when an archive offers three million, verification crosses a threshold beyond which only statistics and probabilities remain. The records that make recognition hardest are built up in strata of stamps, corrections, and rewritten decisions. The ‘CM/1’ files — the application files displaced persons submitted to the International Refugee Organization for assistance, now held at the Arolsen Archives — are the object of a collaboration with the pattern-recognition group of Professor Gernot A. Fink at TU Dortmund.23
The Summer University program also asks us to build richer digital objects. Why, for example, should a dataset travel alone? A project on the history of migration conferences that we are currently designing can build, around a relational core, a layered corpus: the proceedings themselves, the contemporary press coverage, the scholarship of the time, and the scholarship of today. Mixed methods then move between the macro-view, which locates where close reading is worth the historian’s attention, and the deep dive that returns, always, to the document. And it asks us to build the instruments ourselves and to divide the labor, rather than wait for firms whose general-purpose models answer to actors who do not share our questions or our sources. Let one kind of model open the source, reading, extracting, and linking at scale, ideally as a source-bound knowledge graph in which every statement carries its provenance and a graded measure of certainty, so that the contradictions in the record are preserved rather than smoothed away.24 Let the interpretation stay with us, tied to the documents and to the people those documents register, never to a model’s fluent voice. Joanna Guldi calls the text-mining turn at once a revolution and a danger, and both verdicts are true; Torsten Hiltmann’s experiments point to the corrective: the model performs best exactly where a historian’s knowledge guides it.25 There is no shortcut to expertise.
None of this is, in the end, a translation of the old craft into a new medium. The critical historian cannot simply be carried across. The coming generation will not transition from analog roots, as an older one did slowly over thirty years, from a first relational database in the early 1990s; it will grow up in a world where the non-digital method is marginal, something seen only once in a proseminar. The virtues of the craft have to be preserved, but the method itself has to be reinvented over what will likely be a period of trial and error, much as the critical method we now take for granted was the work of generations. To refuse that task would be a betrayal of one’s students and our discipline. It also has an institutional and economic edge that the humanities tend to avoid: unless we move from playing on our laptops to becoming serious computational actors, with access to real processing time and the resources it requires, we will be reduced to consumers of tools built by others, and the open question will be whether historians remain involved in the production of history at all.
The summer university’s visit to the Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration, in a building raised for a colonial exhibition and now given over to representing migration and diversity, is the place to close. CRC 1604 runs a transfer project in such a space, ‘Reflexive Migration Research in the Museum’, with the documentation center DOMiD, which is building Germany’s first national museum of the ‘migration society’, not of ‘immigration’: here, too, the category matters.26 The task it sets is to intervene without reproducing the very figures whose production we have traced. Adrian Favell has pressed the hardest version of the difficulty: every analytical vocabulary tends to acquire the governance function it set out to expose, and ‘production’, our own word, is not exempt.27 The name of our Center is itself a wager, and a reflexive discipline keeps that wager visible rather than pretending it has none. The tension cannot be dissolved. It can only be navigated, in the open.
An excursion took participants to the French Immigration Museum (Photo: Rass)
So this essay returns, at last, to the card. The clerk’s hand, when filling in Tullio Beltrami’s data, did not record a foreigner who was there. It made one, as data, and the figures made through norms, registers, classification practices, datafication, academic and public discourse went on to organize hostels, schools, statistics, scholarship, and now the maps, the corpora, and the models we build to study it. The same operation runs forward into the present, where asylum procedures and borders are datafied in real time, the new infrastructure layered over the old paper without ever fully replacing it. Even a fully digitized future would not retire the oldest questions: what counts as an event worth recording, who records it, who keeps the record, who is trained to read it, and who assigns significance to the narratives that result. Silencing is structural, not a function of scarcity. The honest task is not to claim a vantage point outside the categories, which we do not have and never will, but to write the history of migration and diversity from inside the work that produces them. On the card, the decision stood in plain sight. The model is the newest clerk, and it writes from a hand we can no longer read. The bias has not grown; its transparency has fallen; and to keep reading that hand, from the inside and with open eyes, is the work that remains.
Notes from the discussion
The exchange after the lecture circled, more than once, around a single worry, voiced most directly by the chair: that the diagnosis seemed to leave no way out, and that it placed a heavier burden on digital history than the analogue craft ever had to carry. My reply, and the questions that followed, sharpened several points.
Is the bias growing, or only less visible? Machteld Venken proposed that the new models add a layer of distortion of their own, so that bias grows rather than merely loses transparency. I let the tension stand: both readings are defensible, and the reflexive task holds either way. What I added was a concrete reason the worry is not a machine fault to be patched but a historical condition to be read: as their supply of text runs short, the firms building these models have begun buying up antiquarian books, reference works, and old scholarship to feed them, so that whatever a model later returns has already passed through the same archive, and the same biases, we are trained to read against the grain.28 If that is where the data come from, one might as well pay the national archive a visit. Venken also recalled a wiki-based knowledge graph shown earlier in the week that already did much of what the argument asks for, binding provenance and a graded certainty to each entry; the constructive direction was not hypothetical but already on the table.
Prof. Dr. Machteld Venken & Prof. Dr. Mareike König during the concluding discussion of the DHIP Summer-University (Photo: Rass)
Can you hold your own standards in the text-mining? Yes, and I tried to say how: standard text-mining components assembled in Python, documented code, and primary data prepared so the research can be reproduced. The harder problem is not the method but the practicable standard, what we must submit alongside our results so that a public can hold us to account, a demand that multiplies as the data grow. Why it matters shows in the corpus itself: run the discipline’s own writing through the pipeline, and the operations that produce voice and the operations that produce silence appear side by side. When, in the 1970s, the Chicago School’s ‘second generation’ was carried onto a different society, a few contemporaries warned that the transfer mistranslated both the term and the two societies it moved between; they were not heard, and the corpus still preserves the objection it silenced. One tension I cannot yet resolve sits underneath all of this: ambiguity-preserving documentation, which keeps every uncertainty on the record, and efficient modeling, which resolves them to move at scale, pull against each other, and the semantic-wiki and the hard-data-modeling traditions still barely speak. We are, in this, a little like Goethe’s sorcerer’s apprentice. One reason we press the question at all is that so few others do: the field is either too fascinated or too repelled to press us, which makes it the more important that we press ourselves.
What about confidence and probability scores? Recognition itself is, I think, largely a solvable problem, and a model that refuses to guess can be a virtue: faced with a barely legible hand, a model that declines to supply a plausible but unverifiable reading is doing exactly the right thing. Highly curated, domain-trained models already read difficult historical hands: the Swedish National Archives’ ‘Swedish Lion’, trained on court records from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, reads early-modern Swedish at scale, and the Osnabrück indices were processed to a high reported accuracy on structured forms, every card checked by hand.29 As the essay argues, the question that matters lies not in the character but in the confidence of the answer the model builds from it — and that question only sharpens as the archive grows.
Translation, or reinvention? A participant asked whether the task was to translate the critical historian into the digital or to reinvent the figure. The latter, I believe — for the reasons the essay gives. A follow-up that anyone working on a category like ‘unclear nationality’ should first study the diplomatic record that produced it opened the most constructive idea of the afternoon: that a dataset need not travel alone, but can be built as a layered object in which quantitative reach and close reading become two movements of one practice.
And when the source problem disappears? A final question imagined a future in which nearly everything is digitized and source scarcity no longer constrains us. The structural questions the essay names would remain untouched: these, not the supply of documents, are where silencing lives. The closing note was institutional rather than technical: unless historians become serious participants in computation, with the processing time and resources it demands, the surface systems of the future will write history on request, on a sunny afternoon in Paris, without us. That is the prospect worth refusing, and the reason to hold our own.
Note: This section is reconstructed from my notes and paraphrased throughout. All errors are mine.
References
Summer university ‘Doing Migration History with Digital Methods’, German Historical Institute Paris (DHIP) with the Luxembourg Center for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH, University of Luxembourg), 22–26 June 2026. Speaker names, affiliations, session order and paper titles follow the conference program; the summaries draw on the speakers’ submitted papers. Sessions referenced: ‘Exploring Migration Using Digital Network Analysis I’ (chair: C. Rass; Binoux, Hopp); ‘Modelling and Analysing Migration through Textual Data’ (Mitrofanov); ‘Datafication and Migration Databases’ (Rhodius).↩︎
The Beltrami case and the figures drawn from it derive from the Osnabrück foreigners’ registration index (Ausländermeldekartei, Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv Osnabrück, Dep 3 c Akz. 2019/83) as reconstructed in the author’s research; biographical details follow the verified keynote text. On the index as a source: Sebastian Bondzio, Linda Ennen-Lange, Lukas Hennies, Sebastian Huhn, Max Pochadt, Christoph Rass and Janine Wasmuth, ‘Die Osnabrücker Ausländermeldekartei 1930–1980. Potenziale als Quelle der Stadt- und Migrationsgeschichte’, Osnabrücker Mitteilungen 126 (2021): 137–193; Janine Wasmuth and Christoph Rass, ‘Die Osnabrücker Ausländermeldekartei’, Archiv-Nachrichten Niedersachsen 27 (2023).↩︎
Markus Krajewski, Paper Machines: About Cards and Catalogs, 1548–1929, trans. Peter Krapp (MIT Press, 2011).↩︎
Aggregate figures for the Osnabrück index (c. 83,000 arrival entries, more than 70,000 persons, 1881–1980).↩︎
DFG Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 1604 ‘Production of Migration’ / ‘Produktion von Migration’, Universität Osnabrück.↩︎
That Max Weber introduced the term ‘Gastarbeiter’ is a result of the author’s research on the genealogy of the figure: Christoph Rass, ‘Gastarbeiter’ – ‘Guest Worker’. Translating a Keyword in Migration Politics (IMIS Working Paper 17, Osnabrück 2023); and Christoph Rass, ‘Gastarbeiter’ in the Nazi Press (1933–1945). Formative Years of a Key Term in Migration Politics (IMIS Working Paper 22, Osnabrück 2026). Weber’s own usage: Hinduismus und Buddhismus (Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie II, Mohr/Siebeck 1921).↩︎
The three-forces model (institutionalization, subjectivation, transformation), developed by the author with Hajo Holst: Christoph Rass and Hajo Holst, ‘When Categories Come Alive: Theorizing Generative Dynamics in “Figures of Migration”’, in Production of Migration, vol. I: The Concept of the Production of Migration, ed. Andreas Pott et al. (Cham: Springer, forthcoming).↩︎
Ian Hacking, ‘Making Up People’ (1986); ‘Kinds of People: Moving Targets’ (Proceedings of the British Academy 151, 2007, 285–318); the ‘woman refugee’ example is in The Social Construction of What? (Harvard UP, 1999).↩︎
Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (MIT Press, 1999): on ‘torque’, and on the way every category valorizes one perspective and silences another.↩︎
On the ‘displaced person’ of 1945 as a produced political category, Sebastian Huhn and Christoph Rass, ‘Displaced person(s): the production of a powerful political category’ (Ethnic and Racial Studies 48/4, 2025, 718–739). On ‘migrantization’, Katharine Charsley and Nicole Hoellerer, ‘Migrantisation: a key concept’ (Comparative Migration Studies 13, 2025); and Janine Dahinden, ‘A plea for the “de-migranticization” of research on migration and integration’ (Ethnic and Racial Studies 39/13, 2016, 2207–2225).↩︎
Ahmet Celikten, Maik Hoops, Christoph Rass and Lale Yildirim, ‘Situating “Gastarbeiterkinder”: Science, School, and the Production of Figures of Migration’, in Production of Migration, vol. II: Empirical Approaches, ed. Isabelle Löhr et al. (Cham: Springer, forthcoming). The contribution shows that the city administration’s 1971 municipal report had deliberately avoided the compound ‘Gastarbeiterkind’. Primary source: Reinhardt Köhler, Bericht zur Situation der Gastarbeiter in Osnabrück (Stadt Osnabrück / Der Oberstadtdirektor, 1971), Stadtarchiv Osnabrück.↩︎
John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (Free Press, 1995), on institutional / social facts.↩︎
J. B. Harley, ‘Deconstructing the Map’ (Cartographica 26/2, 1989, 1–20); Johanna Drucker, ‘Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display’ (Digital Humanities Quarterly 5/1, 2011), on ‘capta’; Henk van Houtum and Rodrigo Bueno Lacy, ‘The Migration Map Trap. On the Invasion Arrows in the Cartography of Migration’ (Mobilities 15/2, 2020, 196–219).↩︎
Corpus of c. 6,000 German-language texts on migration and the school system: roughly 70 million words in raw form, c. 45 million in the cleaned working corpus (the figure used here).↩︎
José van Dijck, ‘Datafication, Dataism and Dataveillance: Big Data between Scientific Paradigm and Ideology’ (Surveillance & Society 12/2, 2014).↩︎
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Beacon Press, 1995).↩︎
Bowker and Star, Sorting Things Out: on the way every category valorizes one perspective and silences another.↩︎
Lara Putnam, ‘The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast’ (American Historical Review 121/2, 2016).↩︎
Ida Marie S. Lassen, Jens Christian Bjerring and Kristoffer L. Nielbo, ‘Silencing in Data Science Practices’ (Big Data & Society 12/3, 2025), which carries the vocabulary of silence into data work; contrasted here with Trouillot and with Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton UP, 2009).↩︎
Mrinalini Luthra, Konstantin Todorov, Charles Jeurgens and Giovanni Colavizza, ‘Unsilencing Colonial Archives via Automated Entity Recognition’ (Journal of Documentation 80/5, 2024, 1080–1105).↩︎
Jessica Marie Johnson, ‘Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads’ (Social Text 36/4, 2018, 57–79).↩︎
Processing of the Osnabrück indices: external service provider, deep-neural-network recognition exploiting the geometry of the structured forms, with a historical register of residents and street names supplied as a lexicon. On the data-driven processing of these mass card indexes, including the Osnabrück Gestapo-Kartei: Sebastian Bondzio and Christoph Rass, ‘Data Driven History – methodische Überlegungen zur Osnabrücker Gestapo-Kartei als Quelle zur Erforschung datenbasierter Herrschaft’, Archiv-Nachrichten Niedersachsen 22 (2018): 124ff.; and Sebastian Bondzio and Christoph Rass, ‘Die Osnabrücker Gestapo-Datei’, Osnabrücker Mitteilungen 124 (Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 2019).↩︎
The ‘CM/1’ files are Arolsen Archives collection 3.2.1 (IRO ‘Care and Maintenance’ Program, c. 1947–1952). Prof. Gernot A. Fink holds the chair of Pattern Recognition at TU Dortmund (document-image analysis and handwriting recognition).↩︎
On source-bound knowledge graphs with provenance and graded certainty, the lecture pointed to a wiki-based knowledge-graph approach presented earlier at the summer school.↩︎
Jo Guldi, The Dangerous Art of Text Mining: A Methodology for Digital History (Cambridge University Press, 2023); Torsten Hiltmann et al., ‘NER4all, or Context is All You Need: Using LLMs for Low-Effort, High-Performance NER on Historical Texts. A Humanities-Informed Approach’ (arXiv:2502.04351, 2025).↩︎
Transfer project ‘Reflexive Migration Research in the Museum’, with DOMiD (Dokumentationszentrum und Museum über die Migration in Deutschland), Cologne. DOMiD’s planned museum, long under the working title ‘Haus der Einwanderungsgesellschaft’, is to open as ‘Museum Selma’ (Cologne, scheduled 2029).↩︎
Adrian Favell, The Integration Nation. Immigration and Colonial Power in Liberal Democracies (Polity, 2022); cf. Philosophies of Integration (Macmillan, 1998). The formulation ‘every analytical vocabulary tends to acquire the governance functions it set out to expose’ is the author’s own sharpening of Favell’s critique, not a quotation.↩︎
As their supply of web text is exhausted, firms training large language models have turned to printed books as a data source, in some cases buying and destructively scanning them at scale. On these acquisitions and the antiquarian-book trade they have drawn on, see, e.g., ‘Inside an AI start-up’s plan to scan and dispose of millions of books’, The Washington Post, 27 January 2026; and ‘Rare book dealers fear tech firms are destroying obscure editions to train AI models’, NL Times, 25 June 2026.↩︎
On domain-trained recognition of difficult historical hands, see the Swedish National Archives’ (Riksarkivet) ‘Swedish Lion’ handwritten-text-recognition model for Swedish court records, c. 1600–1900, developed by its AI lab (AIRA) with Transkribus and partner archives. On large language models reaching state-of-the-art transcription of historical manuscripts, see ‘Unlocking the Archives: Using Large Language Models to Transcribe Handwritten Historical Documents’ (arXiv:2411.03340, 2024). The claim here is that such models read difficult hands at scale, not that they surpass expert human readers in general.↩︎
Der monatliche Newsletter der Arbeitsgruppe Neueste Geschichte und Historische Migrationsforschung der Universität Osnabrück
Von Eduard Usov & Jessica Wehner
Der Juni brachte eine bemerkenswerte thematische Dichte: Displacement, Erinnerung und die Frage, wessen Erfahrungen in der Geschichtsschreibung sichtbar werden – und wessen nicht. Im Zentrum stand der Vortrag von Samantha Knapton über queere Erfahrungen von Vertreibung im Nachkriegseuropa, der zugleich Anlass war, grundsätzlicher über die blinden Flecken klassischer Migrationsgeschichte nachzudenken. Hinzu kamen Einblicke in die Konferenzreisen von Team NGHM. Was die Beiträge und Ereignisse des Monats verband, war eine gemeinsame Frage, die selten so klar hervortrat: Wie entscheiden wir, welche Geschichten erzählt werden – und mit welchen Methoden lassen sie sich überhaupt fassen?
Über die vielseitigen Aktivitäten des Teams berichtet unsere Juniausgabe des Newsletters.
Einblicke
Das NGHM-Team richtete gemeinsam mit IMIS und SFB 1604 am 4. Juni die vierte Alfred-Landecker-Lecture (organisiert von Dr. Sebastian Musch) aus. Samantha Knapton (Nottingham) sprach zu ihrem Konzept “twice displaced”: Queere NS-Verfolgte, die Lager überlebten, erfuhren mit Kriegsende keinen Ausschluss aus einem Territorium mehr, sondern aus Anerkennung und Historiographie – die Nachkriegsjahre bezeichnete Knapton als “straightestes” Jahrzehnt des 20. Jahrhunderts. Anhand des Falles Pierre Seels zeigte sie, wie ein Betroffener nie staatliche Anerkennung erhielt und 2005 staatenlos starb.
Sebastian Musch führt in den Vortrag von Samantha Knapton ein (Foto: Jessica Wehner)
Methodisch plädierte Knapton dafür, queere Leerstellen im Archiv nicht als Quellenlücke, sondern als Produkt der Kategorien selbst zu lesen (etwa des fortgeltenden §175). Eine rein empiristische Lektüre der Akten reproduziere epistemische Gewalt. In der Diskussion blieb offen, wo die Grenze zwischen disziplinierter Rekonstruktion und Hineinlesen ins Schweigen verläuft.
Dr. Sebastian Huhn, Jessica Wehner, Prof. Dr. Christoph Rass, Dr. Samantha Knapton und Dr. Sebastian Musch (vlnr) nach dem Talk (Foto: Imke Selle)
Wozu taugt noch das Konzept ›Volksgemeinschaft‹ in Vermittlung und Praxis – Thema der abschließenden Podiumsdiskussion (Foto: Michael Gander)
Das Wesertal als Kulisse der Inszenierung)
Der Workshop präsentierte Ergebnisse aus dem DFG-Projekt “Überwachung. Macht. Ordnung.”, das die Zentralkartei der Staatspolizeistelle Osnabrück digital erschlossen hat: Verfolgungswissen stammte demnach stärker aus Verwaltung und Wirtschaft als aus Partei oder Gestapo, private Denunziation spielte eine geringere Rolle. In der Kriegsphase betrafen fast zwei Drittel der Haftereignisse Zwangsarbeiter:innen. “Volksgemeinschaft” erscheint damit als arbeitsteilige gesellschaftliche Praxis, nicht als bloße Stimmung. Eine Exkursion zum Lernort sowie ein Podium mit Elke Gryglewski und Wiebke Hiemesch verbanden diese Befunde mit Fragen der Gedenkstättenarbeit.
Danach ging es für Christoph Rass weiter nach Paris: Dort hielt er die Keynote der Summer School ‘Doing Migration History with Digital Methods’, die vom 22. bis zum 26. Juni am German Historical Institute Paris (DHIP / Institut historique allemand) stattfand und von Prof. Dr. Mareike König gemeinsam mit dem Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH, University of Luxembourg) organisiert wurde. Seine Keynote unter dem Titel “How Migration Became Data, How Data Makes Meaning, and How Reflexive Migration Research Intervenes” thematisierte die Möglichkeiten digitaler Methoden in einer reflexiven Migrationsforschung. In Kürze folgt eine gekürzte Version der Keynote als Blogbeitrag.
Prof. Dr. Christoph Rass @ DHIP (CC-BY 4.0 DHIP)
Vom 29. Juni bis zum 1. Juli 2026 nahmen Jessica Wehner und Annika Heyen auf Einladung von Michael Mayer (Akademie für Politische Bildung Tutzing) und Frank Caestecker (Universität Ghent) an der internationalen Tagung „From Geneva to Schengen. Shaping Immigration and Refugee Protection in Western Europe, 1951-1994“ teil. Die Konferenz fand statt in und ausgerichtet von der Akademie für Politische Bildung Tutzing am Ufer des Starnberger Sees – in Partnerschaft mit der Universität Ghent – und bot Wehner und Heyen die Möglichkeit, einem internationalen Publikum Einblicke in ihre Dissertationsprojekte zu geben.
Jessica Wehner und Annika Heyen bei der anschließenden Diskussion des Panels Shaping the Refugee Regime before the Geneva Convention (Foto: Marcel Berlinghoff)
Nicht nur Team NGHM war auf Reisen, sondern auch die Studierenden: Derzeit findet erneut das Willy-Brandt-Seminar statt, das die NGHM jährlich in Zusammenarbeit mit der Bundeskanzler-Willy-Brandt-Stiftung in Berlin anbietet. Das von Frank Wolff geleitete Seminar mit Exkursion verbindet Forschung und Public History direkt. Zum einen erforschen die Studierenden anhand spannender und selten genutzter Quellen aus dem Nachlass Willy Brandts eigene Forschungsfragen. Zum anderen konzipieren sie sehr konkret, wie diese Inhalte in eine öffentliche Ausstellung übertragen werden können. In diesem Jahr beschäftigen sich die Teilnehmer:innen mit der Frage, welche Europakonzepte im Exil und im Widerstand gegen den Nationalsozialismus entwickelt wurden, wie sie sich je nach politischer Ausrichtung unterschieden und welche Themen dabei im Vordergrund standen: Wie gelingt Frieden? Welches „Europa“ braucht es dafür? Wie verhindert man Imperialismus? Und wie stärkt und sichert man Rechte?
Seminarteilnehmer:innen in intensiver Diskussion im Forum Willy Brandt, Berlin.
Um dies lebendig zu gestalten, fuhren die Teilnehmerinnen vom 2. bis 5. Juni 2026 nach Berlin. Dort fand der Kernteil des Seminars erneut im eigens dafür für einige Tage reservierten Forum Willy Brandt, der Berliner Dauerausstellung der Bundeskanzler-Willy-Brandt-Stiftung, statt. So konnten die Studierenden in intensiver Arbeit direkt „vor Ort“ Ideen entwickeln, wie sich Geschichte in die Öffentlichkeit bringen lässt. Komplettiert wurde das Seminar durch Exkursionen zur Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand und zum Dokumentationszentrum Flucht, Vertreibung, Versöhnung, bei denen die Seminarteilnehmerinnen durch besondere kuratorische Führungen Einblicke in das laufende Geschäft und hinter die Kulissen des Ausstellungsmachens erhielten.
Am 22. und 23. Juni 2026 fand unter Leitung von Sebastian Musch eine Exkursion nach Köln statt. Im Zentrum stand dabei die jüdische Geschichte Kölns. Die Domstadt am Rhein kann sich mit der seit dem Jahr 321 n. u. Z. verbürgten Ansiedlung jüdischer Menschen der ältesten jüdischen Gemeinde nördlich der Alpen rühmen.
Studierende der UOS auf dem jüdischen Friedhof in Bocklemünd (Foto: Sebastian Musch)
Diese rund 1700 Jahre jüdischen Lebens sind geprägt von Verfolgung und Antisemitismus – vor allem in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, als beinahe die gesamte jüdische Gemeinde der Stadt vertrieben oder ermordet wurde. Daneben ist die jüdische Geschichte Kölns aber auch eine Geschichte von Resilienz, gesellschaftlichem Aufstieg und Wiederaufbau. Besonders im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert erlebte das Kölner Judentum eine Periode der Prosperität und Anerkennung. Auf dem Programm standen ein Besuch des Doms, der Altstadt, der Synagoge, des jüdischen Friedhofs in Bocklemünd, des Lern- und Gedenkortes Jawne und des NS-Dokumentationszentrums. Ein gemeinsamer Exkursionsbericht der Teilnehmer:innen folgt auf diesem Blog.
Am 30.6. moderierte Sebastian Musch eine Podiumsdiskussion zum Thema “Antisemitismus heute” am Nussbaum Museum in Osnabrück. Es diskutierten Michael Grünberg von der Jüdischen Gemeinde Osnabrück, Pastorin Dr. Daniela Koeppler, die Beauftragte f. christl.-jüd. Dialog im Kirchenkreis Melle-Georgsmarienhütte, Dr. Winfried Verburg von der Gesellschaft für Christlich-Jüdische Zusammenarbeit Osnabrück e.V. und Du’A Zeitun von der Muslimische Jugendcommunity Osnabrücker Land MUJOS e.V. Es wurde eine lebhafte Diskussion, die vor allem die Notwendigkeit deutlich machte, in öffentlichen Räumen einen konstruktiven Rahmen für eben solche Debatten zu bieten. Die Podiumsdiskussion fand im Rahmen des Begleitprogramms zur Ausstellung Van den Yoden statt, die noch bis zum 30. August 2026 im Kulturgeschichtlichen Museum Osnabrück zu sehen ist.
Am 24. Juni endete nach drei Monaten der Gastaufenthalt von Morten Baarvig Thomsen am Institut für Migrationsforschung und Interkulturelle Studien (IMIS) und damit im Team NGHM. Morten nutzte die Zeit am Institut für den Austausch mit Kolleg:innen, die Begleitung von Lehrveranstaltungen und die vertiefte Arbeit an seinem Dissertationsprojekt ‘Experiences of the Danish Refugee Care System: Allied Displaced Persons in Denmark 1945-1953′.
Am 1. Juni war Christoph Rass im Rahmen des Transferprojekts des Sonderforschungsbereichs 1604 “Produktion von Migration” zu Gast im ReflexLab. Unter dem Titel “Revisiting Solingen and Hanau. The living memory of racist attack and the (potential) roles of migration researchers” ging er in den Austausch mit Mert Peksen und Emma Brahm mit ihrem ebenfalls am IMIS angesiedelten Projekt “GeRäuMig“. Die Gemeinsamkeit der beiden Projekte? Beide befassen sich unter anderem mit der lokalen Erinnerungskultur an den rassistisch motivierten Brandanschlag auf das Haus der Familie Genç in der Unteren Wernerstraße in Solingen in der Nacht vom 29. Mai 1993. Geleitet von der Frage nach dem Einfluss von Forscher:innen auf die Erinnerungskultur diskutierten sie mit Jens Schneider vom Reflex Lab über ihre Erfahrungen im Feld und die Grenzen dessen, was sie mit ihrer Arbeit erreichen können und sollten.
Marcel Storch und Johannes Pufahl bei der Vorbereitung des Drohnenbeflugs zwecks fotogrammetrischen Scans der “Friedensbaracke”
Am 16. Juni begaben sich Annika Heyen, Johannes Pufahl und Tim Ott gemeinsam mit unserem Kollegen Marcel Storch von der Arbeitsgruppe für Fernerkundung und Digitale Bildverarbeitung sprichwörtlich “ins Feld”. Marcel Storch digitalisierte mit Unterstützung durch das Team T-Projekt die mit zum Teil kniehohem Gras umgebene “Friedensbaracke” im Osnabrücker Landwehrviertel. Die Baracke wurde 1937 als Teil einer Ausbildungskaserne der Wehrmacht errichtet, diente ab 1940 als Kriegsgefangenenlager – ab 1941 vor allem für serbische Offiziere – sowie nach Kriegsende als Lager für sogenannte “Displaced Persons” und anschließend bis 2009 als Baracke der britischen Streitkräfte in Deutschland. Obwohl bislang vor allem konnotiert mit dem Thema Krieg und Frieden, hat dieser Ort also auch Bezüge zur Migrationsgeschichte, die jedoch auf den ersten Blick kaum sichtbar sind.
Johannes Pufahl, Tim Ott und Marcel Storch bereiten den LiDAR-Scan mit dem terrestrischen Laserscanner vor. Die Pfähle mit Reflektoren dienen dem Scanner zur Orientierung im Raum (Foto: Annika Heyen)
Bei der Scanaktion fanden zwei verschiedene Methoden Anwendung: Mithilfe einer Drohne wurde eine Reihe von Fotos aufgenommen, aus denen ein sogenanntes fotogrammetrisches Modell der Baracke zusammengesetzt werden kann. Der Terrestrische Laserscanner arbeitet hingegen mit LiDAR (Light Detection and Range), bei dem das Gerät für das menschliche Auge unsichtbare Laserstrahlen aussendet und misst, in welcher Entfernung diese Strahlen auf Widerstand treffen. Dadurch entsteht eine “Punktwolke”, aus der wiederum ein dreidimensionales, digitales Modell erstellt werden kann. Die Scanaktion verfolgte neben der Erstellung eines digitalen Zwillings der Baracke das Ziel, diese beiden Methoden anhand eines Objekts auf ihre Praktikabilität und die Qualität des am Ende generierten digitalen Modells miteinander zu vergleichen.
Notizen
Im Juni verabschiedete sich Team NGHM von Timo Diener. Timo war seit Anfang 2025 studentischer Mitarbeiter im Team und hat das Kernteam bei der Zuarbeit in Forschung und Lehre unterstützt. Ab Juli übernimmt Timo eine Volontariatsstelle und schließt seine Masterarbeit ab. Wir wünschen ihm alles Gute für seine berufliche Zukunft!
Zum 1. Juni begrüßte Team NGHM ein altbekanntes Gesicht: Eduard Usov, der bereits im A3-Team des SFB 1604 Teil der NGHM war und im Bachelor studiert, unterstützt nun die Redaktion des NGHM-Blogs auf Hypotheses. Zu ihm gibt es ein ausführliches Portrait.
Zum 15. Juni durfte das Team Lennart Blömer begrüßen. Lennart hat kürzlich seinen Bachelor mit einer Arbeit zur Konstruktion der Glaubwürdigkeit in frühen NS-Prozessen gegen Justizpersonal abgeschlossen. Die Ergebnisse dieser Arbeit wird er am 2. Juli auch im sechsten Tiny Desk Kolloquium vorstellen.
Am 30. Juni erschienen die ersten Podcastfolgen des SFB 1604 – Produktion von Migration. Die Reihe beginnt mit einem Porträt des Forschungszentrums und geht anschließend auf dessen Interviews ein. Unter den derzeit verfügbaren Folgen wurden zwei von Christoph Rass konzipiert und mitmoderiert, jeweils mit einer anderen Gesprächspartnerin: die erste mit Catherine S. Ramírez (Santa Cruz), die zweite mit Lale Yildirim (Kiel). Beide gehen von der Frage aus, die das gesamte CRC leitet: Wie entsteht Migration? Nicht als natürliches Ereignis, das einfach geschieht, sondern als etwas, das geschaffen wird: durch Politik, durch Institutionen, durch Kategorien und nicht zuletzt durch die Wissenschaft selbst.
Am 2. Juli findet das sechste Tiny Desk Kolloquium zum Thema “Aktuelle migrationsgeschichtliche Forschung” statt. Studierende bekommen zuerst die Gelegenheit Abschluss- und Projektarbeiten vorzustellen und im zweiten Teil folgen Kurzvorträge.
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Der Wissenschaftsblog der Professur für Neueste Geschichte und Historische Migrationsforschung der Universität Osnabrück
