Colloquium: Emotional Communities and the Problem of Representation: Polish-German Migrations into the Ruhr Valley around 1900

The Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, led by Prof. Ute Frevert, cordially invites all interested to attend its winter semester 2019/2020 colloquium:

Anne Friedrichs, Leibniz-Institut für Europäische Geschichte, Mainz

Emotional Communities and the Problem of Representation: Polish-German Migrations into the Ruhr Valley around 1900

The talk will present an extract from Anne Friedrichs' habilitation project on Polish-German migration into the Ruhr Valley from 1860 to 1950, treating them as a case study that can help us to rethink our conception of political-legal and emotional cohesion – or: society. The case of Polish-German labor migration is particularly enlightening because we generally do not associate the heterogeneous newcomers to the Ruhr region with the lure of the exotic. These migrants were often regarded as near in the sense that they came predominantly from Prussia and, thus, were in large part Prussian citizens. However, they were also perceived to be distant from the Ruhr Valley because of their partly different language, denomination, and cultural customs. An analysis of the diverse, changing and interacting differentiation and evaluation processes these migrants were involved in provides insights into the influence regional actors exerted through administrative practices related to the marking of boundaries, the diverse ways in which social relationships were entered into and emotionally evaluated by newcomers, and the consequences these interacting processes had both for the societal order and the life of the individuals who could be grouped as “foreign” – or “Poles” in the case of the Ruhr region.

Anne Friedrichs is a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz. Her current research focuses on the history of Europe in global and translocal relationships in the 19th and 20th centuries, the history of migration, mobility and cross-cultural interactions, history of historiographies and of the humanities and microhistory. Her recent publications include a special issue, which explores transits between migration, mobility and sedentariness (Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 2018). In 2019, she co-edited a special issue that deals with mobility and migration during the formation and transformation of the modern (nation-)state, explicating the conflictive and fluctuating character of borders (Journal of Borderlands Studies, 2019).