Main content
Top content
A5 ›Refugees‹ and Others: The Production of Refugee-Related Figures since the 1970s
Prof. Dr. Isabella Löhr
Principal Investigator
History
Freie Universität Berlin and Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam (ZZF)
Details
The 1970s witnessed an intensification of social debates about flight and asylum in German-speaking Europe, and these contestations remain acute to this day. The increasing significance of flight and asylum in both the public and political spheres is accompanied by an expansion in the social production of refugee-related figures, being at the center of this project. The creation and usage of such figures communicates ideas about the (il)legitimacy of (potential) migrations as well as the ›utility‹, ›danger‹, or (non-)affiliation of those who are on the move. The older figure of the ›refugee‹ – a figure that tends to have positive connotations – was attached with new and mostly negative meanings, and thereby made to appear different. Various figures emerged from these negotiations, such as ›bogus asylum seekers‹, ›unaccompanied minors‹, ›boat refugees‹, ›tolerated persons‹, ›refugees‹, ›vulnerable refugee women‹, ›skilled refugees‹, ›economic migrants‹ or ›illegal migrants‹.
This project assumes that these are not trivial semantic shifts. Instead, historical figures and categories are constructed and they become relevant for the perception and classification of people on the move, as well as for the ways in which society deals with them. As such, the refugee-related figures produce a specific knowledge about migration that is closely linked to social processes of exclusion and inclusion and to competing prerogatives of interpretation. The figures thus provide information about migration regimes that vary in historical and spatial terms, and in which migration has been negotiated in particular ways from the 1970s to the present day.
Numerous stakeholders from the political, judicial and administrative spheres, civil society, economy, media and science – not to mention the labelled persons themselves – were and are involved in the negotiation of such figures. The project analyzes the discursive shifts and their power effects, focusing on the competitive, interactive and transfer-related aspects of the relationships between stakeholders. Where and in what context does a figure appear and how does their career develop? Why, how and by whom are figures created, discarded or modified, and in the context of which interests, resources and goals? To what extent did the figures emerging from the nation-state, post-colonial, European and Cold War discourses of the FRG and the GDR influence each other? And how did German reunification influence existing figures and which new figures emerged since then? To what extent can similarities and differences be drawn between this case and the developments in Austria and Switzerland?
To approach these questions, we first carry out statistical analyses on a broad empirical base of text corpora from the GDR, former West Germany and Germany since 1990 as well as Austria and Switzerland (including parliamentary minutes, newspaper articles, legal texts) in order to identify significant figures. Selected figures are then subjected to a qualitative, historically contextualizing in-depth analysis in order to reconstruct the process of the creation and negotiation of the figures from a comparative perspective as well as in its national specifics. By combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, the project aims to trace the production and differentiation of flight-related figures in German-speaking countries since the 1970s from a comparative and transnational perspective, and to understand their significance for the social negotiation of migration.
News
Press:
- ›Waffen im politischen Kampf‹. Interview mit Jochen Oltmer. taz, die tageszeitung
- ›Flüchtling‹ – die ambivalente Karriere eines umstrittenen Begriffs. UOS Pressemeldung
- ZZF an Sonderforschungsbereich ›Produktion von Migration‹ beteiligt. ZZF Pressemeldung
Publications:
- Löhr, Isabella, and Jochen Oltmer. 2024. Flüchtling. In Inventar der Migrationsbegriffe, Eds. Inken Bartels, Isabella Löhr, Christiane Reinecke, Philipp Schäfer, Laura Stielike, and Maurice Stierl. doi: 10.48693/540
- Oltmer, Jochen. 2024. »Flüchtling«: Eine Figur im Wandel bundesdeutscher Migrationsgeschichte. Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 74(45): 10–15. Open Access
- Oltmer, Jochen. 2024. Das gesellschaftliche Sprechen und Schreiben über Migration: Mehr als ein Wort. Herder Korrespondenz 7: 28–30.
- Oltmer, Jochen. 2024. Das gesellschaftliche Sprechen und Schreiben über Migration. In Dossier Zugehörigkeit und Zusammenhalt in der Migrationsgesellschaft. Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung: online
