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> From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW <h-rev...@lists.h-net.org>
> Date: August 23, 2020 at 1:22:27 PM EDT
> To: h-rev...@lists.h-net.org
> Cc: H-Net Staff <revh...@mail.h-net.org>
> Subject: H-Net Review [H-Diplo]: Polak-Springer on Panagiotidis, 'The
> Unchosen Ones: Diaspora, Nation, and Migration in Israel and Germany'
> Reply-To: h-rev...@lists.h-net.org
>
> Jannis Panagiotidis. The Unchosen Ones: Diaspora, Nation, and
> Migration in Israel and Germany. Indianopolis Indiana University
> Press, 2019. xvii + 363 pp. $40.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-253-04362-7.
>
> Reviewed by Peter Polak-Springer (Qatar University)
> Published on H-Diplo (August, 2020)
> Commissioned by Seth Offenbach
>
> Scholarship on European state patronage of national (ethnic) kin
> living abroad, particularly in neighboring contested borderlands, has
> seen a flourish in the last decades. In the late 1990s, political
> scientist Rogers Brubaker coined a term for it: "external homeland
> nationalism." Moreover, he connected it to another one of his
> well-known concepts, (national) "unmixing," referring to the movement
> of people from the foreign lands in which they are ethnic
> "minorities" to their "motherland," where their ethnicity forms the
> core group.[1] In recent decades, historians have taken a strong
> interest in the _longue dureé_ of Central and Eastern Europe's
> unmixing--the era that began with carving up of former monarchical
> imperial domains into nation-states in 1918 and culminated in a
> whirlwind of violence and ethnic cleansing-driven flight and
> expulsions of millions in 1939-50.[2] As a nation with a long history
> of ethnic-based political outreach to its minorities in Eastern
> Europe, and as a prime target of expulsions at the end of World War
> II, Germany has been the center of scholarly focus. Scholarship on
> the continuation of this unmixing of presumed Germans, who continued
> to live in a region that spanned from East-Central Europe to the
> Balkans and the Soviet Socialist Republics from the 1950s and into
> the 1980s and 90s is still quite limited.[3] These official
> "resettlers" (_Aussiedler_), or "late resettlers" (_Spätaussiedler_)
> as they were called in later decades, were allowed to emigrate to the
> Federal Republic of Germany (FRG or West Germany) to reunite with
> family members within the motherland or to escape persecution or
> forced assimilation as Germans in their homeland abroad.
>
> _The Unchosen Ones_ is the main title of a thrilling and insightful
> new study by Jannis Panagiotidis that takes an entirely different
> approach to studying these issues. His work marks the first extensive
> monographic comparison of "resettlement" (_Aussiedlung_) to the FRG
> with "ascent" (_Aliyah_), the term denoting the migration of Jews
> from around the world to Israel.[4] To Panagiotidis, both these
> emigrant nations have looked on their newcomers not just as any other
> migrants but as ethnic kin living abroad, whose welfare and ethnic
> identity need to be protected by the state and national community of
> their motherland. Certainly, Israel has promoted an official mission
> of being a safe haven for Jews under persecution. However, Germany's
> history of state outreach to German minorities abroad quite blatantly
> connects to interwar revanchism and Nazi expansionist politics.
> Indeed, one needs only to recall how Adolf Hitler called for the
> rights of Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia and the German minority
> in Poland as a pretext to annex their homelands. After World War II,
> expellee associations and the Federal Ministry Expellees in the FRG
> represented a hotbed of border revisionism, political activism by
> former Nazis, and denial of Nazi-era crimes against other nations.
> Even until today, the expellee (_Vertriebenen_) politics, which
> _Aussiedlung_ was always inherently entwined with, raises controversy
> as the preoccupation of the right wing.[5]
>
> Without ignoring them, Panagiotidis's work challenges these political
> and historical memory barriers, which for long have stood in the way
> of scholarly efforts to de-provincialize this and similar aspects of
> twentieth-century German history. He is quite right to stress that
> strong similarities and entwinements warrant a comparative and
> transnational treatment of the FRG and Israeli experience in that
> main topic of his work, co-ethnic migration. Moreover, only such an
> approach also allows for the analysis of critical differences between
> the two cases, to which he also gives extensive attention. As
> Panagiotidis points out, both _Aussiedlung_ and _Aliyah_ are part and
> parcel of a Cold War-era history of unmixing. Moreover, these are not
> just two separate case studies of a common phenomenon, each with its
> own individual historical narrative running parallel to that of the
> other, but rather in many respects represent a _histoire croisée
> _(entangled history). For one, to some extent both shared roots in
> European ethnic nationalism as well as the crimes of Nazism. Jews who
> made attempts to migrate to both Israel and the FRG, as well as those
> coming to Germany as "Jewish quota" refugees, mark a key subject of
> Panagiotidis's discussion. In another aspect of entwinement, both
> _Aussiedlung_ and _Aliyah_ drew their co-ethnics from a common
> Eastern European geographical sphere that included Poland and Russia.
>
> Panagiotidis addresses how postwar _Aussiedlung_ has its roots in
> interwar, Nazi, and wartime-era German _Volk_ politics
> (_Volkstumpolitik_). However, he also stresses that it was something
> different from this. It was not based on any Nazi ideas of biology or
> race and it was significantly removed from more traditional
> nationalist tenets of German national belonging
> (_Volkszugehörigkeit_) that stress German blood, soil, and culture
> (_Blut, Boden, und Kultur_). According to Panagiotidis, _Aussiedlung_
> "was not simply based on ascriptive criteria of descent or culture"
> but rather on a subjective "self-avowal or _Bekenntnis_" to belonging
> to the German nation (pp. 318-19). In this regard, he characterizes
> it as a "Renanian" process of conceptualizing nationality as a type
> of (daily) plebiscite. To further set _Aussiedlung_ apart from prewar
> _Volkstumspolitik_, Panagiotidis emphasizes that it was based on an
> applicant selection process, or "ethnic screening," that was
> flexible, "dynamic and relational" and became particularly inclusive
> from the 1960s to the 80s (p. 316).
>
> As part of one aspect of his two-pronged major argument, Panagiotidis
> ascribes this flexibility and dynamism to what he emphasizes was an
> interplay of actors involved in the selection process. He refers to
> these as "gatekeepers" and "gatekeeping institutions," or in other
> words those in charge of defining national belonging and the ethnic
> screening process (pp. 4, 316). These "bouncers" of the border gates,
> as Panagiotidis refers to them (pp. 7, 314), included state
> representatives, experts, and civil society actors. In Israel, rabbis
> and doctors, and in the FRG, _Vertriebenen_ associations played a
> prominent role. They were part of a multifaceted "migration regime"
> that guarded two major "gates" for co-ethnic applicants, an "external
> gate" (the "first point of control"), which was usually in their
> country of origin, and an internal gate in their place of final
> destination (p. 315). By no means were _Aussiedlung/Aliyah_
> applicants passive bystanders; rather, they took an active role in
> "performing" the narratives (in the FRG case) or even forging the
> documents (in the Israeli one) needed so as to adjust to a shifting
> criteria for co-ethnic membership to each of these countries.
> Panagiotidis argues that all of this made ethnic selection as well as
> notions of who is and is not German/Israeli "not unilateral acts of
> definition, but part of a multilevel, transnational politics of
> identification" (p. 314). This point situates Panagiotidis in accord
> with Brubaker's constructivist notion of ethnicity being a product of
> bureaucratic classification.[6] According to Panagiotidis, the
> "interplay" of variegated "actors" and active role of migrant
> applications that constituted the "migration regimes," coupled with a
> dynamic, negotiated, and "never absolute" ethnic screening processes,
> made the category of national (co-ethnic or member of the national
> community) a relational category (pp. 7, 316).
>
> The second part of Panagiotidis's argument emphasizes that despite
> the above factors, which were common to the two cases, there was a
> major ideological difference between them. _Aussiedlung_ remained
> tied to the tenets of the lost German homeland of Eastern Europe.
> This meant that its mission was "providing welfare and safe-haven"
> (p. 20) and even a social setting where the _Aussiedler_ can live "as
> Germans among Germans" (p. 252), but not--officially at least--a new
> homeland altogether, which would have meant forfeiting Germany's
> claims and ties to that in Eastern Europe from which they came. This
> was contrary to _Aliya_, which was fundamentally about gathering
> global Jewry in Israel. There was also a contrast in the ideal types
> of co-ethnics for which each nation searched. According to
> Panagiotidis, particularly in the early postwar decades, "the
> selective Aliyah regime strove to keep out those deemed a burden on
> society, the sick and poor--who often were identified with 'oriental'
> Mizrachi and in particular, Moroccan Jewry--and allow entry to those
> considered useful" (p. 85). This is because the "traditional Zionist
> ideological project of pioneer settlement combined with the creation
> of an urban middle class, which was deemed indispensable for a modern
> nation-state" (p. 85). By contrast, the FRG made no selection based
> on youth, body, fitness, or utility, but rather chose applicants with
> a demonstrated "self-avowal" (_Bekenntnis_) to Germandom. Based on
> these different policies, Panagiotidis wittingly draws a
> juxtaposition of the ideal _Aussielder_ to the ideal _Oleh_ (_Aliyah_
> migrant): "in contrast to the bodiless Aussiedler, the Oleh was very
> much a physical being--a 'muscle Jew' and 'pioneer' (_halutz_), as it
> were" (p. 130).
>
> Much of Panagiotidis's work demonstrates that the actual practice of
> co-ethnic applicant screening and selection often did not conform to
> ideological tenets. While chapter 1 elaborates on the core
> ideological difference that remained a constant behind each case's
> co-ethnic migration politics, chapter 2 emphasizes the "huge room for
> arbitrariness" (p. 84) in the evaluation of _Aussiedlung_/_Aliyah_
> applications. Nevertheless, the 1950s marked a time of subjecting
> applicants to particular scrutiny, rigid criteria, and distrust. The
> typical criteria for co-ethnic recognition in the FRG included having
> relatives in West Germany and knowledge of German. Moreover, as part
> of Panagiotidis's wider observation of the impact of the political
> Zeitgeist on each country's selection policies, he notes that the
> politically conservative 1950s put an applicant from Croatia to the
> FRP, who had been a soldier in the _Wehrmacht_, in better standing
> than one who fought against the latter in the resistance. In contrast
> to these criteria, the new nation-building Israelis erected a
> "'medical border' (p. 108)" in search for the fittest, most useful,
> and finest (in the cultural/racial sense) _Oleh_. As Panagiotidis
> points out, North African Jewish _Aliya_ applicants faced the most
> likely rejections due to "cultural imagery representing oriental
> immigrants as backward, lazy, and prone to sickness," while Ashkenazy
> Jews from Poland were favored as "diligent and productive members of
> the middle class" (p. 109).
>
> Chapter 3 offers more of a bottom-up view of the selection process,
> in that it examines how actual cases of applicants were handled.
> Panagiotidis focuses on marginal or ambiguous cases in a wider effort
> "to spell out border belonging and not belonging" (p. 4). He takes
> particular interest in applicants that highlight the transnational
> connection between his two case studies, such as German Jews who
> applied for _Aussiedlung_ to the FRG after they made _Aliyah_ to
> Israel, and who tended to be treated as belonging to Jewish rather
> than German nations. With regard to the Israeli case studies, he
> looks at a case of Brother Daniel, who applied for _Aliyah_ as a
> former Jew and descendant of Jews, but was rejected on grounds of
> being a Christian convert. Based on such cases, Panagiotidis argues
> that in neither of the two case studies was ethnicity or descent
> sufficient for applicant acceptance. In the FRG, cultural elements,
> such as language, and German descent were neither enough nor as
> important for acceptance as _Bekenntnis_. In the case of Israel,
> being a descendant of Jews also did not suffice if the applicant was
> not Jewish.
>
> In chapter 4, Panagiotidis looks at the era from the mid-1960s to
> mid-1970s marked by _Ostpolitik_ (in the FRG) and détente, which he
> refers to as a "watershed in the history of co-ethnic immigration to
> West Germany and Israel" (p. 196). The turning point was the
> liberalization of admission policies in both states, whereby both
> came to resemble one another more than ever before in this regard.
> Both now allowed for descendants of their target group (Germans/Jews
> abroad) to be admitted as _Aussiedler/Oleh_, and in this and other
> respects became "more inclusive, less selective, and focused on
> migrants with conceptually more remote links to each nation," which
> Panagiotidis refers to as "derived Germans and Jews" (pp. 196-97).
> During this era, both cases also commonly drew from Eastern Europe
> and the USSR. In fact, Israel changed the Law of Return, which was at
> the crux of its co-ethnic regime, so that descendancy "could be
> claimed from any Jew, anytime, anywhere, down to two generations" (p.
> 237). In contrast, the FRG restricted its inclusion of descendants to
> only the first postwar generation of those of self-avowed Germans
> from Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, this bold move turned German
> co-ethnics in this region into "'long-distance' citizens" of sorts
> and thus gave co-migration to the FRG the "return" character of its
> Israeli counterpart (p. 204).
>
> The fifth and last chapter focuses on the 1980s and the first
> post-Cold War decade. In contrast to the preceding era covered in
> chapter 4, in this one the two cases became different from one
> another. However, Panagiotidis sees this as a continuity rather than
> an alternation in the "political, ideological, institutional, and
> legal developments in both countries" due to the unique condition
> each faced after the "breakdown of the common Cold War framework" (p.
> 248). This chapter allots the bulk of its space to official debates
> on co-ethnic migration within the (the pre- and post-unification) FRG
> and Israel. In the former, migration based on _Aussiedler_ status
> became a tenet of the center-Right and expellee associations, while
> the Left sought to remove the ethnic basis of migration in general.
> Moreover, the FRG made substantial policy changes, which Panagiotidis
> characterizes as a greater "ethnicization" of migration requirements
> (p. 248). This includes a ruling on the wartime (Nazi) _Volksliste_,
> especially category 3 thereof, that excluded it as a basis for
> proving national belonging. In that respect, he claims that this
> "implied being ethnically more selective than the Nazis: Slavs who
> were German enough to be included in the Volksliste and received
> conditional citizenship in the Second World War were not German
> enough to be recognized as German Volkszugehörige in the late 1980s"
> (p. 274). Finally, in the early 1990s, Germans enacted a forthcoming
> end to Aussielder migration by making 1992 the birth year cutoff for
> anyone eligible to claim this status based on descent. In the Israeli
> case, Panagiotidis examines debates between Orthodox, secular
> conservatives and liberal factions over issues such as who is a Jew
> and whether a Jewish convert should qualify for _Aliyah_. At one
> point, he notes that the Israeli-Palestinian demographic struggle
> drove secular conservatives to drop their former "puritan practice"
> of calling for restriction and embrace loose criteria to acquire "a
> better biological stock for the country from Russia in the 1980s"
> (pp. 227-8). Unlike in the FRG, no change was made to Israeli policy
> from the previous decades, and thus co-ethnic migration was left to
> continue indefinitely. However, in practice, Panagiotidis points out
> that "due to domestic problems" _Aliyah_ encountered a serious slump
> in the 1980s and 90s, unlike _Aussiedlung_ (p. 277). Moreover, Jews
> from the former Soviet Union preferred to come to the FRG as "Jewish
> quota refugees," a migrant category the German government created as
> part "ethnicization" of applicant acceptance (p. 248).
>
> The conclusion provides an extensive summary of the major comparisons
> and contrasts between the two cases, the major arguments, and the
> overarching context of ethnic nationalism and unmixing. The chapter
> endnotes and bibliography demonstrate the extensive research
> Panagiotidis undertook in German and Israeli archives, where he
> examined records, which included, but were not limited to, those of
> ministries, parliaments, immigration courts.
>
> Overall, this is work is pathbreaking in its painstaking efforts to
> comparatively analyze two case studies, which were quite different on
> account of their global location and their internal affairs.
> Panagiotidis's major contribution is the offering of a useful
> analytical framework for the study of ethnic nationalism, and
> particularly, state migration policies based on notions of belonging
> to the nation. The terms he coins, for example, gatekeepers
> ("bouncers") and external and internal gates, as well as his deep
> insight into the multifaceted nature of policymaking and selection
> practices will surely be of interest not just to historians but
> anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists. The
> intensity of the analysis of this study makes it an important
> contribution to studies on nationalism, comparative world history,
> Europe and the Middle East, Jewish history, European, German, and
> Israeli history, in addition to, as Panagiotidis claims, scholarship
> on "citizenship, migration control, medical borders and national
> building through immigration" (p. 21). Although he does emphasize the
> importance of migrant experiences, especially borderline cases, the
> vast majority of this book takes a top-down (official policy) focus.
> Nevertheless, this extensive transnational treatment of migration to
> (West) Germany and Israel is a welcome contribution to a scarce
> literature connecting Central Europe with the Middle East. However,
> in this regard, its author tends to hold back from any extensive
> critical engagement with the Israeli "nation building" he commonly
> cites it as a motive for policies marked by racial discrimination
> (e.g., preference for white Aliyah applicants from Eastern Europe
> over nonwhites from Africa). This notwithstanding, _Unchosen Ones_ is
> a masterfully analyzed, well written, and pathbreaking contribution
> to global and comparative history of ethnic nationalism and return
> migration.
>
> _Peter Polak-Springer is Associate Professor of Modern History at
> Qatar University and works on borderlands, contested spaces, and
> forced migration in Central Europe and the Middle East during the
> twentieth century. _
>
> Notes
>
> [1]. Rogers Brubaker, "Aftermaths of Empire and the Unmixing of
> Peoples," in _Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National
> Question in the New Europe_, ed. Rogers Brubaker (Cambridge:
> Cambridge University Press, 1996), 148-78.
>
> [2]. Examples include Omer Bartov and Eric Weitz, eds., _Shatterzone
> of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg,
> Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands_ (Bloomington: Indiana University
> Press, 2013); Pieter M. Judson, _The Habsburg Empire: A New History_
> (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018);
> Tara Zahra, _Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle
> for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1948_ (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
> University Press, 2008); Timothy Snyder, _Reconstruction of Nations:
> Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569_ (New Haven, CT: Yale
> University Press, 1999); Alexander Prusin, _The Lands in Between:
> Conflict in the East European Borderlands, 1870-1992_ (Oxford: Oxford
> University Press, 2010); Steven Béla Várdy, T. Hunt Tooley, and
> Otto von Habsburg, eds., _Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century
> Europe_ (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 2003); Hugo Service,
> _Germans to Poles: Communism, Nationalism and Ethnic Cleansing after
> the Second World War_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013);
> Gregor Thum, _Uprooted: How Breslau Became Wroclaw during the Century
> of Expulsions_ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011);
> Eagle Glassheim, _Cleansing the Czechoslovak Borderlands: Migration,
> Environment, and Health in the Former Sudetenland_ (Pittsburg:
> University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016); and Peter Polak-Springer,
> _Recovered Territory: The German-Polish Conflict Over Land and
> Culture, 1919-1989_ (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015).
>
> [3]. See David Rock and Stefan Wolff, eds., _Coming Home to Germany?:
> The Integration of Ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe in
> the Federal Republic_ (New York: Berghahn, 2002); and Manuel, Borutta
> and Jan C. Jansen, _Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar Germany
> and France: Comparative Perspectives_ (Basingstoke: Palgrave
> Macmillan, 2016).
>
> [4]. See R. K. Silbereisen, Peter F. Titzmann, and Yossi Shavit, _The
> Challenges of Diaspora Migration: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on
> Israel and Germany_ (London: Routledge, 2016); and Takeyuki Tsuda,
> _Diasporic Homecomings Ethnic Return Migration in Comparative
> Perspective_ (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).
>
> [5]. See Pertti, Ahonen, _After the Expulsion: West Germany and
> Eastern Europe 1945-1990_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010);
> and Andrew Demshuk, _The Lost German East: Forced Migration and the
> Politics of Memory, 1945-1970_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University
> Press, 2014).
>
> [6]. See Rogers Brubaker, _Ethnicity Without Groups_ (Cambridge, MA:
> Harvard University Press, 2006).
>
> Citation: Peter Polak-Springer. Review of Panagiotidis, Jannis, _The
> Unchosen Ones: Diaspora, Nation, and Migration in Israel and
> Germany_. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. August, 2020.
> URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55111
>
> This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
> Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
> License.
>
>
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