From (Re)unification to Forced Repatriation: German Strategies for Returning Foreign Employees Home

Paige Newhouse, University of Michigan

In 1992, a Berlin-based organization called the Association of Experts in the Field of Migration and Development Cooperation (AGEF) circulated a pamphlet amongst the Vietnamese community in the city. AGEF advertised a professional training program to Vietnamese citizens who had previously come to East Germany to work under bilateral trade agreements. AGEF promised to teach participants practical and technological skills that would help them manage factories or build their own businesses. After the nine-month training program, however, participants would return home. This condition was nonnegotiable. The program offered by AGEF was one of many schemes introduced by German citizens to encourage Vietnamese workers – legally in the country – to voluntarily repatriate after German (re)unification. This paper examines schemes that specifically targeted Vietnamese citizens – the largest group of foreign employees in East German factories and the largest group of foreign employees to stay after (re)unification – to coax them to leave. In the aftermath of German reunification – often remembered as a peaceful revolution amongst white Germans – factory administrators, policy makers, and non-profit organizers, collaborated in efforts to force the foreign workforce in the former East out of the newly united country. This paper argues that, while Germans promised to improve the prospects of former workers when they returned home, these schemes were an integral part of German state building and reflect who both Germans in power and ordinary citizens imagined as part of their new state.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 132. Nationalism on the Ground: Migration, Inclusion, and Exclusion in Postwar Europe