Migration and Sociation Beyond the National Paradigm: A Micro History of the Ruhr Poles, 1870-1950

• Applicant: Dr. Anne Friedrichs
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2014 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 269231027

In the last few years, the notion that societies cannot be explored as closed entities has become prominent in historical science research. Yet, thinking in fixed national entities has often persisted, even in migration history. Research on the migration of the Ruhr Poles, for instance, largely takes for granted the existence of a "receptive" society from which Polish migrants separated themselves into a sub-culture, but then integrated into over the course of time. This perception has to be fundamentally revised. By superseding methodological nationalism with a micro-oriented history of entanglement, this project reveals the dynamics and changeability of cultural relations, the interplay of migration and processes of change, and the specialty of place and countryside in relation to widespread developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Firstly, this study shows how the conjunctures of multi-layered and often-unequal exchanges developed between heterogeneous migration groups and the differentiated Ruhr society, which was in parts also mobile. Rather than belonging to separated entities, individuals and groups often meshed and mutually influenced each other. Secondly, this project examines the influence of various contacts on a society in transition and surveys the meaning of migration from the lower and middle classes for cultural, social, economic, and political-administrative changes in the Ruhr region. Thirdly, it focuses on a rural and culturally heterogeneous area that research thus far has ignored, despite the fact most migrants (female and male) settled next to the coal mines in the countryside. It balances the negotiating range, tendencies of adaptation, and resistance in relation to an increasing, and then fading, nationalism, as well as a globalising economy. Altogether, this inquiry thereby contributes to how a culturally sensitive history of migration and society can be substantiated from the angle of the exchange relations of humans from different origins.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Cooperation Partner: Professorin Dr. Angelika Epple