Citation/Abstract

Between 1945 and 1995 over 1 million Yugoslav political émigrés, guest workers, and refugees migrated to the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). Yugoslays migrated to the FRG for a range of reasons including political persecution, unemployment, and war and hence did not form a unified or homogenous community in West Germany. This dissertation focuses on the development of Yugoslav migrant communities and West German state policies towards them in the post-World War II period. It traces how the language that West German authorities and the West German press used to talk about Yugoslav migrants changed over time and relates these changes in language and designation to the development of West German domestic and foreign policy priorities. For example, while Yugoslays were increasingly described as "European" during the 1970s, by the 1990s within the context of German reunification and the influx of refugees from war torn Bosnia, the "European" designation for Yugoslays virtually disappeared and was replaced with a variety of terms including: Serbs, Croats, Bosnian Muslims, refugees, and asylum seekers.

By relying on a broad source base and including archival material from the German Foreign Office, the German National Archives, local city and state archives in Bavaria and Munich, the archives of the company Siemens, as well as German and Yugoslav press records, social science studies, and interviews with Yugoslav migrants currently living in the FRG, this dissertation brings emigration, immigration, integration, labor, cultural, and foreign policy together within a single analytic framework. It therefore not only to fills an existing gap in historical scholarship (namely the story of Yugoslav migrants in the FRG), but it also complicates current conceptions of the relationship between migration history and West German political, cultural, and economic history. Whereas in the past migration studies have frequently been segregated from the larger West German historical narrative, this study illuminates the ways in which West German policies towards migrants were shaped by ongoing confrontations with the legacies of National Socialism, the emergence of the Cold War, the FRG's economic miracle, the development of Ostpolitik , German reunification, and the wars in Yugoslavia during the 1990s.