People in Transit: German Migration in Comparative Perspective: 1820-1930.

Among European countries, Germany's migrants have received perhaps the most scholarly attention. The enormous emigration of Germans to the Americas, the central role of the German economy in Europe during the entire twentieth century, and the volatile movements of Germans within their own country make the study of German migrations central to the understanding of mobility as a demographic force. This volume offers both summaries of a lengthy research tradition and new studies by scholars from Central Europe and the United States.

The papers collected here were originally presented in 1991 in Bremerhaven at a conference co-sponsored by the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., and the Labor Migration Project at the University of Bremen. Bringing scholars together from both sides of the Atlantic was intended to develop a "transatlatlantic perspective" on German migrations, as explained by Walter Kamphoefner in his summary of the state of research. This phrase symbolizes both the strengths and weaknesses of this enterprise and the individual articles.

Kamphoefner is himself a significant exponent of a transatlantic methodology, having coedited volumes of German emigrants' letters in both German and English versions. He lists several major interpretive assumptions about migration which require evidence from both sides of the Atlantic: economic causes of emigration, the relationship of origin and destination, and the activities of emigration agents. Accepting this challenge, several articles about the acculturation of German emigrants in the New World, especially those by Joy Lintelman and Silke Wehner on German female domestics in the United States, demonstrate the importance of understanding the interactions between the culture brought to America and the expectations found here. Deirdre Mageean uses an even wider comparative view to demonstrate how national differences in the experience of European emigrants in America relate to cultural differences of origin.

The transatlantic perspective of the two host institutions for the Bremerhaven conference focuses especially on international migrations, mainly German emigration to the United States. Other "German migrations" are treated briefly in this volume or not at all. The extensive German emigration to Latin America is barely mentioned. The most intense German migration, the internal migration which peaked around 1900, is treated in two articles out of twenty. Although the broadly conceptual articles by Dirk Hoerder, Klaus Bade, and Kamphoefner all stress the causal links between emigration and internal migration, it is clear that research agendas and institutional funding still tend to compartmentalize these demographic twins.

This volume offers no startling revelations or new claims about German migration. The best known historians of migrations within Germany (James H. Jackson, Jr., Karl Barfuss, and Bade) and emigration to the United States (Kamphoefner and Hoerder) offer summaries and details from their other published work. Rather than innovation, the book, like the conference, represents a series of statements about the field of German migration research. The most obvious statement is that this demographic specialty is thriving with considerable institutional support, even as the broad field of historical demography is losing appeal to younger historians and to publishing houses. The unified German government, like most of its twentieth-century predecessors, considers migration a political subject of great significance. That interest helps to explain the disproportionate stress on international movements; Bade's work here and elsewhere demonstrates the intimate connection between politics and international migration in German states since the early nineteenth century. Political and academic interest in internal migration, so strong before and during the Nazi era, is only gradually recovering from the postwar distaste for demographic subjects in Germany. As in other historical fields, the study of the common events of daily life, such as internal migration, is dependent on its connection with other fields which excite more public interest.

The connection of migration research to the wider political world is more complex, however, than state support for research. This volume also makes two statements about how the field is changing and will continue to develop. The momentous political events in Germany have altered the research landscape, too. Rainer Muhle from the University of Rostock and Axel Lubinski and Uwe Reich from Potsdam bring their pre-unification research project on nineteenth-century emigration from eastern Germany into the western academic mainstream. They have excellent untapped data sources and a deep concern for the place of migration in the structure of daily life. Their interpretive apparatus and literature base still display the effects of isolation from western, especially non-German, academic work. As yet their contribution cannot go beyond the description of local trends, such as the similarity in changes in emigration volume over the nineteenth century from several eastern German regions (see figures on pp. 60 and 81).

A second statement comes out of the evolution of that western scholarship, as it seeks to become more inclusive of women. Part III of the book, focusing on "Women's Migration," blends recent work on domesticity, the history of labor, and marriage markets with migration data to demonstrate the particular effects of emigration to America on single and married German women. In contrast to most of the other essays collected here, the articles by Suzanne Sinke on the international marriage market, by Lintelman and Wehner on domestic servants, by Mageean and Sibylle Quack on the cultural changes wrought by emigration, and by Monika Blaschke on the German women's press all cite a broad range of literature on international migration and women's history in English and German. Their work shows the effects of study in the United States, where citing only one's own national literature, still apparently acceptable even for western Germans, is considered inadequate.

These contributions from outside the traditional confines of western historical demography indicate potential new directions in the field of German migration research. Along with closer transatlantic cooperation and exchange, broader inclusion towards the east and towards women will keep this field lively and relevant.

Steve Hochstadt Bates College