Migration als Transnationale Geschichte.: Ostmitteleuropa um den Ersten Weltkrieg

Abstract

Migration as Transnational History. East Central Europe around World War I. Transnational History addresses the dialectics of entanglement on the one hand and of formations of socio-political containers on the other. Migration is an obvious illustration of such processes. From this perspective, the article sketches the integration of East Central Europe into regional, continental and global migratory regimes since ca. the 1830s, and the consequences of this development for sending as well as for receiving societies, highlighting Poland and the US. In a second step, it discusses the implications of an accordingly conceived history of migration for established historiographical assumptions at hand of the caesura that World War I supposedly meant for the region. Finally, it suggests a micro-historical approach of “translocation” to supplement and potentially revise the presented findings.