This snapshot is a tapestry of voices from the major groups who came after the second great caesura, 1989, the end of Cold War and the opening toward the East: the ethnic Germans (2.3 million after 1987 and Gorbachev’s Perestroika) and 230,000 Jewish “quota refugees” (from 1990 onwards), both from the former Soviet Union and subjects of subsequent chapters; and many others, such as the ethnic Germans from Poland or Polish labor migrants who work in Germany but continue to live in Poland. It also touches on the 400,000 Soviet soldiers who left the former GDR until 1994 and the Eastern German “interior” migrants who began commuting to jobs in Western Germany.

The German lands – a nation-state came into being only in 1871 – were a major world region for outmigration until the middle of the nineteenth century. This chapter tells the story of emigration from Germany, highlighting parallels between how German immigrants were treated abroad and how immigrants in Germany were, and indeed are, being treated. It begins by showing how migration had always been a reality for Germans. After that it turns to the United States and Russia, the two main destinations of emigration, especially during the mass migration in the 1800s, making Germans the United States’ largest ethnic group. With poverty and religious and political persecution as main push factors, Germans on the move were subjected to discrimination, even racism, physical violence, and pogroms. They reacted by hyper-assimilation or retreat into ethnic communities, particularly from the early 1900s onwards when hybrid identities – German and American/Russian – came under threat from homogenizing nationalism. This history needs to be remembered so that Germans realize how quickly history can turn around: once a liability, a German passport today is coveted by many, but this may change.

Eastern Europe and the USSR had large German minorities. In the USSR this dated back to Catherine the Great, who in 1763 issued a manifesto inviting Germans to settle and colonize land on the Volga in exchange for tax and legal privileges. During Gorbachev’s Perestroika the German minorities began making use of the West German law of return that immediately granted them citizenship as Aussiedler – a consequence of the ethnobiological definition of German nationhood (but why, assimilated, tax-paying, Germanophone second-generation descendants of Turkish labor migrants wondered, should russified descendants of labor migrants to eighteenth-century Russia have easier access to citizenship than they?). Chapter 6 charts the history and lived experience of the 2.3 million Aussiedler who immigrated since 1987 and who have remained largely invisible in public consciousness. The chapter title encapsulates their fraught situation of dual non-belonging: discriminated against in the postwar Soviet Union as “fascists,” they hoped to rejoin fellow Germans when emigrating, yet in reality were excluded as “Russians.”