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Immigrants and Foreigners in Central and
Eastern Europe during the Twentieth
Century

Immigrants and Foreigners in Central and Eastern Europe during the Twentieth
Century challenges widespread conceptions of Central and Eastern European
countries as merely countries of origin. It sheds light on their experience of
immigration and the establishment of refugee regimes at different stages in the
history of the region.
The book brings together a variety of case studies on Poland, Hungary,
Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, and the experiences of return migrants from
the United States, displaced Hungarian Jews, desperate German social demo­
crats, resettled Magyars, resourceful tourists, labour migrants, and Zionists. In
doing so, it highlights and explores the variety of experience across different
forms of immigration and discusses its broader social and political framework.
Presenting the challenges within the history of immigration in Eastern
Europe and considering both immigration to the region and emigration from
it, Immigrants and Foreigners in Central and Eastern Europe during the
Twentieth Century provides a new perspective on, and contribution to, this
ongoing subject of debate.

Włodzimierz Borodziej is Professor of History at Warsaw University, Poland,

and Joachim von Puttkamer is Professor of Eastern European History at Jena
University, Germany, and co-director of the Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena,
Germany.
Routledge Studies in Modern European History

71 Margins for Manoeuvre in Cold War Europe

The Influence of Smaller Powers
Edited by Laurien Crump and Susanna Erlandsson

72 The European Illustrated Press and the Emergence of a Transnational

Visual Culture of the News, 1842–1870
Thomas Smits

73 Interwar East Central Europe, 1918–1941: The failure of Democracy-building,

the fate of Minorities
Edited by Sabrina Ramet

74 Free Trade and Social Welfare in Europe: Explorations in the Long 20th
CenturyEdited by Lucia Coppolaro and Lorenzo Mechi

75 Immigrants and Foreigners in Central and Eastern Europe during the

Twentieth Century
Edited by Włodzimierz Borodziej and Joachim von Puttkamer

76 Europe between Migrations, Decolonization and Integration (1945–1992)

Edited by Giuliana Laschi, Valeria Deplano, Alessandro Pes

77 Steamship Nationalism: Ocean Liners And National Identity In Imperial

Germany And Atlantic World
Mark Russell

78 Transatlantic Anarchism during the Spanish Civil War and Revolution,

1936–1939
Morris Brodie

79 Emotions and Everyday Nationalism in Modern European History

Edited by Andreas Stynen, Maarten Van Ginderachter and Xosé M. Núñez Seixas

https://www.routledge.com/history/series/SE0246
Immigrants and Foreigners in
Central and Eastern Europe
during the Twentieth Century

Edited by
Włodzimierz Borodziej and Joachim von
Puttkamer
First published 2020
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
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© 2020 selection and editorial matter, Włodzimierz Borodziej and Joachim
von Puttkamer; individual chapters, the contributors
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ISBN: 978-0-367-08582-7 (hbk)

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Typeset in Times New Roman

by Taylor & Francis Books
Contents

List of figures vii

List of contributors viii

Introduction 1
WŁODZIMIERZ BORODZIEJ AND JOACHIM VON PUTTKAMER

1 Refugees and migrants: Perceptions and categorizations of

moving people, 1789–1938 7
MICHAEL G. ESCH

2 Return migration and social disruption in the Polish Second

Republic: A reassessment of resettlement regimes 33
KEELY STAUTER-HALSTED

3 Jewish railway car dwellers in interwar Hungary: Citizenship and

uprootedness 53
ILSE JOSEPHA LAZAROMS

4 Refugees from Nazi Germany in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s: ‘In

the long run, people will go down here’ 73
KATEŘINA ČAPKOVÁ

5 Communities of resettlement: Integrating migrants from the

Czechoslovak–Hungarian population exchange in post-war
Hungary, 1947–1948 87
LESLIE M. WATERS

6 Passports and profits: Foreigners on the trade routes of the Polish

People’s Republic (PPR) 104
JERZY KOCHANOWSKI
vi Contents
7 Socialist mobility, postcolonialism and global solidarity: The
movement of people from the Global South to socialist Hungary 113
PÉTER APOR

8 Migration, gender and family: A bottom-up perspective on

migration, return migration and nation-building in 1950s Poland
and Israel 127
MARCOS SILBER

9 East Central Europe and the making of the modern refugee 145
PETER GATRELL

Index 165
Figures

3.1 ‘Cooking Dinner’, by Dezső Bér (1920), Vasárnapi Újság 67 (2),

25 January 1920, 16–17 60
Contributors

Editors
Włodzimierz Borodziej is the author of The Warsaw Uprising of 1944 (2006),
Geschichte Polens im 20. Jahrhundert (2010), and has published numerous
other monographs, edited volumes, and articles on Polish-German history
in the twentieth century. He is a professor of history at Warsaw University.
From 2010 to 2016, he was co-director of the Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena,
and is now chairman of the Kolleg’s Academic Advisory Board.
Joachim von Puttkamer has authored, edited, and co-edited numerous books on
Central and East European history, including Die Securitate in Siebenbürgen
(The Securitate in Transylvania), co-edited with S. Sienert and U. Wien (2014)
and Ostmitteleuropa im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (East-Central Europe in the
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, 2010). He is co-director of the Imre
Kertész Kolleg and holds the Chair for Eastern European History at Jena
University.

Contributors
Péter Apor is research fellow at the Institute of History of the Hungarian
Academy of Sciences. Between 2003 and 2011, Apor was a research fellow
at the Central European University in Budapest, and an associate
researcher at the University of Exeter (2008–2009). In 2012, he was a
fellow at the Imre Kertesz Kolleg in Jena. His main research interests
include the politics of memory and history in post-1945 East Central
Europe, the social and cultural history of the socialist dictatorships, and
the history of historiography.
Kateřina Čapková is research fellow at the Institute for Contemporary History
at the Czech Academy of Sciences. She also teaches courses at the Faculty of
Arts, Charles University. Her book Czechs, Germans, Jews? National Iden­
tity and the Jews of Bohemia (Berghahn, 2012) was awarded the Choice
Outstanding Academic Title in 2012. Her second book, Unsichere Zuflucht
(Böhlau, 2012) (co-authored with Michal Frankl) focuses on Czechoslovak
 List of contributors ix
refugee politics in the interwar period and the situation of German and
Austrian refugees in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s (it is published both in
Czech and in German). Čapková is currently working on a comparative
study about Jewish settlements in the Czechoslovak and Polish border
regions after the Second World War.
Michael G. Esch received his doctorate in History at the Heinrich Heine
University Düsseldorf in 1996 for his study, ‘“Healthy Conditions”:
German and Polish Population Policy 1939–1950’. In 2011 he completed
his postdoctorate in Modern, Recent and East European History with the
study ‘Parallel Societies and Social Spaces: Eastern European Immigrants
in Paris 1880–1940’. He has been a research assistant at the GWZO in the
project group ‘Ostmitteleuropa transnational’ and EHESS Paris (2004) and
has held various teaching assignments in Germany and in the Czech
Republic.
Peter Gatrell is a renowned historian of modern migration and Professor of
Economic History at the University of Manchester in the UK. His book A
Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Indiana
University Press, 1999; paperback, 2005) won the Wayne S. Vucinich Prize,
2000, awarded by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic
Studies for ‘outstanding work in Russian, East European or Eurasian stu­
dies in any branch of the humanities or social sciences’, and the Alec Nove
Prize, 2001, awarded by British Association for Slavonic and East
European Studies, for an ‘outstanding monograph in Russian and East
European Studies’. His latest book is entitled The Making of the Modern
Refugee (Oxford University Press, 2015).
Jerzy Kochanowski is Full Professor at the Institute of History of the University
of Warsaw. He was Visiting Professor at the Johannes Gutenberg University
in Mainz, Germany, as well as Senior Fellow at the Imre Kertesz Kolleg in
Jena, Germany, in 2011–2012 and in 2018. He is deputy editor-in-chief of
Mówia˛ Wieki 1994–1995, from 2003 a member of the editorial staff of
Przegla˛ d Historyczny, then becoming deputy editor-in-chief from 2010 to
2012, and editor-in-chief from 2013.
Ilse Josepha Lazaroms is a Rothschild Foundation fellow at the Martin Buber
Chair in Jewish Religious Thought at the Goethe University in Frankfurt,
Germany, and the owner of Azarel Press (www.azarelpress.com). Her first
book, The Grace of Misery: Joseph Roth and the Politics of Exile, 1919–
1939 (Brill, 2013) was awarded the 2015 Victor Adler State Prize of the
Austrian Ministry of Science and Education. Her articles have appeared,
among others, in Jewish History, the Leo Baeck Yearbook, the Simon
Dubnow Institute Yearbook, and Zutot: Perspectives on Jewish Culture. She
is on the academic board of the European Review of History. Her book,
Emigration from Paradise: Home, Fate, and Nation in Post-World War I
Jewish Hungary is forthcoming from Stanford University Press.
x List of contributors
Marcos Silber is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Jewish History at the
University of Haifa, Israel, the head of the Department of Multi­
disciplinary Studies as well as the head of the Program for the Study of
Polish-Jewish History and Culture. His fields of research are Jewish culture
and politics in twentieth-century Poland and Lithuania. He has written
articles on the Jewish Diaspora Nationalism movement in Poland,
Lithuania, and Russia in the early twentieth century and on Yiddish and
Polish cinema and popular culture in interwar Poland as well as on Polish-
Israeli relations.
Keely Stauter-Halsted has published widely on questions of peasant mobili­
zation, gender, and sexuality, Jewish–Christian relations, and the impact of
refugees and other migrants on modern state formation. Stauter-Halsted
taught from 1994 until 2010 at Michigan State University, East Lansing.
She was recruited to University of Illinois at Chicago as the first Stefan
and Lucy Hejna Chair in the History of Poland and as a part of a growing
Polish Studies initiative.
Leslie Waters is Assistant Professor at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland,
Virginia. Her publications include ‘Learning and Unlearning Nationality:
Hungarian National Education in Reannexed Felvidék, 1938–1944’, pub­
lished in the Hungarian Historical Review, 2013, and which won the Mark
Pittaway Prize for Best Scholarly Article in Hungarian Studies; and
‘Adjudicating Loyalty: Identity Politics and Civil Administration in the
Hungarian-Slovak Borderlands, 1938–1940’, forthcoming in Contemporary
European History.
Introduction
Włodzimierz Borodziej and Joachim von Puttkamer

Europe is now deeply divided on the issue of immigration. The lines of political
conflict are evident. Most Western Europeans believe that the seemingly
unstoppable influx of asylum seekers from Africa and the Middle East should
be evenly distributed among all member states of the European Union, North
and South, East and West. Sharing a common burden has tested the solidarity
between old and new members, even more so for the liberal, humanitarian
character of the European project itself. Most Eastern Europeans see immi­
gration as a self-induced problem created by the West, in particular Germany
and France, and they believe it is the West that should foot the bill. They view
a European Union that cannot or will not fend off immigrants as the ultimate
threat to endangered national identities. In Hungary and Poland, playing on
such fears serves as the bedrock of national populism. Now that Italy has fallen
in line with Central and Eastern Europe, it has become obvious that this divide
does not simply run between East and West.
Behind this conflict, questions of identity are at stake. At the height of the
debate, Ivan Krastev summed up the causes of what he terms the ‘Central
European refugee resentment’. Among them, he named demographic panic,
fear of ethnic disappearance, the status as relative latecomers to the homo­
geneous nation state, as well as a deeply rooted mistrust towards all sorts of
diversity and towards the cosmopolitan mindset that embraces it.1 To any
reader aware of nineteenth-century nationalism, these arguments sound eerily
familiar. The debate itself is fraught with such historical references. To many
East Europeans, the increasing number of refugees from the Global South is a
long-term effect of Western Europe’s colonial past – something in which they
are not complicit, and for which they do not bear any moral obligation. To
critical observers in Germany, Angela Merkel’s appeal for a humanitarian
approach answers a deep need to finally wash off the guilt of National Soci­
alism. There is also a widely shared assumption that Eastern Europe has little

1 Ivan Krastev, ‘Utopian Dreams beyond the Border’ IWMpost 117, Spring/
Summer 2016, 3–4. http://www.iwm.at/files/IWMpost_117.pdf (accessed 12 Feb­
ruary 2019).
2 Introduction
experience with immigration. At the same time, Eastern Europe’s experience
with mass emigration, particularly during communism when refugees – from
Hungary and subsequently from Czechoslovakia and Poland – found shelter
in the West now fosters indignation directed at an apparent lack of empathy
by those in East for the ‘wretched’ people who have walked all the way from
Syria and Iraq to escape the horrors of war in their home countries.
In the burgeoning field of migration studies, Central and Eastern Europe
indeed figure mostly as countries of origin. Since the nineteenth century,
millions of people have fled poverty and oppression to carve out a new exis­
tence beyond the Atlantic. Mass emigration and political exile have shaped
our understanding of the ‘free world’.2 Émigré communities in North and
South America had a major impact on the formation of nation states in
Central, Eastern, and Southeast Europe.3 Additionally, Eastern Europe has
come to be seen as a laboratory of forced migration and ethnic cleansing.4 This
rich body of research clearly shows that the experience of mass emigration is
closely intertwined with developing notions of belonging, citizenship, ethnic
and racial hierarchies, and purity.
This volume takes the opposite view. It sheds light on the experience of
immigration and the establishment of refugee regimes at different stages of
the twentieth century. Contrary to established conceptions, Eastern Europe
has taken in various waves of immigrants. After the Bolshevik Revolution,
Russian émigrés found refuge in Prague as much as in Berlin or Munich. In
Warsaw, they were not even considered refugees. New state borders, as
established by the Paris Peace Treaties, caused people to leave their home
regions and resettle in neighbouring countries. When the Nazis seized power
in Germany, social democrats and Jews fled to Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia,
or Turkey. During socialism, Eastern European countries supported labour
migration both from brother states in the region as well as from Vietnam,
North Korea, Cuba, or Angola. Some countries resettled refugees from the
Greek civil war. This brief overview demonstrates the diversity of experience
with various forms of immigration, even if one excludes the forced migra­
tions and resettlements in the course of the Second World War and its
aftermath.
The chapters in this volume discuss the broader social and political frame­
work, confronting it with a number of case studies on Poland, Hungary,
Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. At the outset, in Chapter 1, Michael G. Esch
traces the usage of concepts such as ‘refugee’ and ‘asylum’ back to the French

2 Tara Zahra, The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the
Making of the Free World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2016).
3 Ulf Brunnbauer, Globalizing Southeastern Europe: Emigrants, America, and the
State since the Late Nineteenth Century (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016).
4 Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century
Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Philipp Ther, The
Dark Side of Nation-States: Ethnic Cleansing in Modern Europe (New York: Ber­
ghahn Books, 2016).
 Introduction 3
Revolution and throughout the nineteenth century and the attendant moral
ambiguities that came with the establishment of nation states. Both the estab­
lishment of political migrants – as opposed to economic or other migrants – and
the concept of political asylum restructured the possibilities for, and conditions
of, migration and charged it with sometimes competing political and humani­
tarian meanings. The chapter outlines several European and Atlantic ‘refugee
crises’ that occurred during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (most of
which originated in Central and Eastern Europe), the agencies involved in their
creation and mastering, and the often-complex relationships between migrant
reality, administrative categorization, and public perception of ‘forced’ and
‘voluntary’ migrants. It also describes the interactions between the political and
humanitarian concepts of asylum and the transition from political refugees to
refugees as mere victims of repression during the nineteenth century.
In Chapter 2, Keely Stauter-Halsted draws attention to the astonishing
number of more than one million return migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers
who made their way back to Polish territory once the country had regained its
long-awaited independence. Among them were roughly 100,000 Amerykanie,
who boarded transatlantic vessels to journey ‘home’ from North America. This
chapter reassesses the long-term impact of American repatriates, proposing that
we view them as a source of productive forms of social disruption and not, as
has often been the case, as a burden to the new state, prompting spikes in
unemployment, placing pressure on public services, and leading to cultural
conflicts within local communities. Specifically, the ideas and experiences
returnees introduced challenged the authority of the established Church,
the status of local notables, and the habits of civil administrators. These mod­
ernizing impulses threatened the local power structure and sparked ongoing
criticism, but also helped usher in Poland’s transition from imperial subject to
modern state. Focusing on the early years of Polish independence poses new
questions about the overall influence of refugees and returnees, suggesting they
need not be viewed solely as a burden to the state, but rather can be seen as an
impetus for structural change and a force for integration within wider global
communities.
Ilse Josepha Lazaroms investigates, in Chapter 3, the many layers of the refu­
gee question in post-war Hungary. In particular, she deals with the consequences
of post-war territorial revisions and the fate of Hungarian Jews during the rise of
nationalism and the increasingly exclusionist measures taken against them. The
chapter takes the plight of the so-called Jewish vagonlakók, or railway car
dwellers – those stranded for months in abandoned railway cars at the train
stations in Budapest – as an entry point into this question by looking at how
expressions of national allegiance, class, and loyalty have mingled with dis­
courses of anti-Semitism during these volatile years of contested peace. It looks
at how Jews who returned from the ceded territories dealt with a frightening new
kind of statelessness, how the local Jewish communities responded to the pre­
sence of Jewish refugees and expellees, and how Jews interacted with a state and
a nation that no longer welcomed them.
4 Introduction
Chapter 4, by Kateřina Čapková, combines both the perspective of the
Czechoslovak state officials towards the refugees from Nazi Germany and the
varied perspectives of the refugees themselves. It focuses primarily on
the experiences of ‘ordinary’ refugees; people without connections to the
Czechoslovak elite. Their voices, neglected in other research so far, drastically
affects the otherwise positive image of Czechoslovakia as a refuge for people
fleeing Nazism. It shows instead that Czechoslovakia adopted a restrictive
approach that is comparable with those of other European countries – for
instance, Switzerland. The article also analyses the reasons for the dis­
crepancy between the generous policies of the Czechoslovakian government
towards the refugees from the Soviet Union in the 1920s and the restrictive
politics towards rather leftist and Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and
Austria in the 1930s.
Leslie Waters investigates the implementation of the Czechoslovak–Hungarian
population exchange in Hungary in Chapter 5. It focuses on the recruitment
campaign to enlist Slovak volunteers for the exchange and its effect on local
community relations, the difficulties of safely and verifiably moving tens of
thousands of people, and the challenges of integrating the exchangees who
were relocated from Czechoslovakia. It argues that while post-war states were
quite powerful in their ability to expel large populations, they were considerably
weaker when it came to the satisfactory integration of newcomers. The popula­
tion exchange also reinforces the historiographical argument that the immediate
post-war era was a profoundly transitional moment. Class and ethnic identity,
political outlook, and notions of property ownership all changed dramatically in
this period and significantly influenced the population exchange.
Based on his seminal study on the black market in socialist Poland, Jerzy
Kochanowski takes a close look in Chapter 6 at the small community of
foreigners in the Polish People’s Republic. Contact with foreigners was an
economic asset. The demand for Western goods was enormous, and so was
the difference between official exchange rates and the black market. Since the
Second World War, and even more so since 1956, sailors, diplomats, truck
drivers, exchange students, and tourists all participated freely in widespread
smuggling activities, sometimes forming well-organized networks that were
almost equal in scale to some large companies. The only requirement for such
activity was a passport that allowed one to pass through the Iron Curtain.
The chapter gives an overview of who was involved and the goods that were
being traded. The foreigners who participated in the black market may not
have brought down the Iron Curtain themselves, but they can be seen as pre­
cursors to a common European market.
Chapter 7, by Péter Apor, looks at migration from the Global South to Hun­
gary since the 1960s, framing it as a case study on the impact of decolonization
on socialist Eastern Europe. His chapter examines the two most important
aspects of this migration: the influx of students and the labour force. It explores
the concepts of the Hungarian socialist authorities who shaped their policies
towards extra-European migrants and the troubles they encountered, as well as
 Introduction 5
the experiences of integration and exclusion of the migrants. The chapter points
out that the late socialist period was an important phase in the development of
multicultural societies in Eastern Europe. Furthermore, it also argues that the
way Eastern Europeans tackled issues of multiculturalism was very similar to
that of their Western counterparts and, hence, the legacies of this period continue
to shape attitudes towards migration nowadays. Nevertheless, the approach of
the socialist state towards overseas migration involved attempts to enforce social
and cultural homogeneity, which has ultimately played a crucial role in why
Eastern Europeans found themselves unprepared in the midst of growing multi­
cultural encounters throughout the 2010s.
In Chapter 8, Marcos Silber investigates the return migration of Jews from
Israel to Poland and its impact on the dynamic processes of nation-building
and national discourse in both countries. The findings indicate that the Polish
People’s Republic employed the discourses of ethnonationalism and patriarchy
in order to mediate the relations between the state apparatus and citizens in
managing inward and outward migration. From a bottom-up perspective,
these guidelines appear to have structured citizens’ emigration and/or return
applications. Naturally, the grounds adduced for emigrating run counter to
those cited for returning. In seeking to conform to the directives, many
citizens thus seem to have attempted to manipulate the system. From a
top-down perspective, the primary direction reflected the nation-building
project; return migration interfered with the ethnonational paradigm of
‘building a nation state’. This was not the case regarding ‘non-Jewish’
immigrants, especially women; the male patriarchal and patronizing
bureaucrats of both states tended to accept their discourses. The question of
‘returning to Poland’ indicates that the principle of ethnic preference in
immigration policy had various parameters. In this context, the issue of
flexibility and the limitations of including ethnic minorities within the ethnona­
tional whole clearly emerges. Although the boundaries of the ethnonational
collective were much more flexible and fluid than people tend to think, this case
also evinces the bounds of this tractability.
Finally, Chapter 9, by Peter Gatrell argues that Central and Eastern Europe
was foundational in terms of the origins and development of the modern
international refugee regime. The post-1918 Europe and the League of Nations
refugee regime, dedicated in particular to addressing the consequences of the
Russian Revolution and Civil War, as well as post-1945 Europe and the suc­
cessive institutional arrangements under the United Nations Relief
and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), the International Refugee
Organization (IRO), and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees
(UNHCR) are cases in point. This international refugee regime emerged pri­
marily to deal with the aftermath of war in Central and Eastern Europe and
later to support refugees (‘escapees’) from communism. This chapter establishes
the contours of the ‘refugee crisis’ at these different junctures and explains how
a ‘refugee regime’ emerged in order to address it, thereby offering a historical
perspective on current practices and policies across Europe.
6 Introduction
As much as in any other region of the globe, the history of immigration to
Eastern Europe is not a straightforward success story of tolerance, diversity, and
integration. The chapters in this volume show that immigration into the region,
as much as emigration out of it, has caused disruption and mistrust, and chal­
lenged the imaginations of nation states, citizenship, and belonging. Based on
the annual conference of the Imre Kertész Kolleg, titled ‘People(s) on the Move:
Refugees and Immigration Regimes in Central and Eastern Europe During the
20th Century’, which took place in Jena in June 2016, these contributors do not
claim to give a coherent picture, but rather to outline the diversity of the
phenomenon, aiming to contribute to an ongoing debate.
The editors are particularly grateful to Marc Bence for translating the
chapter by Jerzy Kochanowski from Polish, and to Dylan Cram, himself
currently an immigrant, for the diligent language editing of the entire volume.
1 Refugees and migrants
Perceptions and categorizations of moving
people, 1789–1938
Michael G. Esch

It is probably not by accident that most historiographical treatments of refugees

start with more or less elaborate attempts to define what – or who – actually
was and is to be understood under this ‘refugee’ label; hardly any other concept
in the language of public discourse is more charged with political, moral, and
social implications and consequences. At the same time – or even because this
term carries so much weight – the delimitations of its applicability on actual
migrants are highly fluid at best. Its use in the public sphere is always contested
and shaped by often conflicting discursive representations and agendas. This
does not make it any easier for historians to explain what they are actually
dealing with but makes it even more important to try to introduce some
historical reasoning into simplistically historicized debates.
The following pages will attempt to trace the implementations and uses of
the term ‘refugee’ and its linguistic–political predecessors by state and non­
governmental actors, as well as investigate the term’s often complex and
incongruous relationships with actual migration movements. This endeavour
will primarily cover the period from the French Revolution up to the aftermath
of the First World War and will concentrate on Europe. In it, the term ‘refugee’
is not considered to be an intrinsic quality of any migrant but is understood as
an external category that is awarded, or imposed upon, migrants who may, in
turn, claim, accept, use, or refuse it. Incidentally, I shall also try to show how
asylum as a particular legal status – with its promises of subsidies and its
cutbacks in migrant autonomy – not only helped people in need but also
structured migration in establishing a category intrinsic to migrant regimes that
could be used, misused, and transformed. I shall also show how migrations
from the eastern regions of the European continent were crucial for the
development of refugee categories and asylum regimes.
Furthermore, this chapter will try to show that most of the problems and
inconsistencies in today’s refugee regimes stem from the fact that asylum, in
the course of the nineteenth century, ceased to be a primarily charitable and
humanitarian concept and instead became an increasingly political one,
barely moderated by humanitarian concerns or efforts to codify universal
human rights. These ambiguities were closely linked to three intersected
developments during the nineteenth century that created more and more
8 Michael G. Esch
refugees: the secularization of the state, the limitation of permitted and rights­
engendering affiliations to the inherited (or transferred) political assignment
to a nation state after the French Revolution, and the increasing identification
of individuals with the nation states they ‘belonged’ to (and their embodiment
of the main characteristics ascribed to these states). These changes also made
management of this new category of migrants more and more difficult,
contradictory, and inconsistent.

Republican statehood and the beginnings of political asylum

Although the history of flight migration surely dates from the very beginning
of statehood or other institutionalized, territorialized, and armed sociality,
and although the gradual emergence of modern European statehood since the
confessional wars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had already sub­
stantially increased flight migration, the production of refugees and the
granting of asylum fundamentally changed with the advent of the bourgeois
republic at the end of the eighteenth century: the French Revolution abolished
not only the old estates, i.e. the nobility, clergy, and tiers état and their
respective privileges, but also any affiliation other than adherence to the
(republican) nation. Together with the assumption of a direct, non-mediated
relationship between the individual and an abstract, impersonal nation state,
the American and French ‘citizenship revolution’1 completely changed the
structure of flight migration and asylum. As the alleged source and bearer of
state sovereignty, the individual was transformed into a political animal,
easily identified with the state and its interests, which consequently allowed
for his or her exposure as disloyal. The first such group was the émigrés,
about 140,000 nobles, bourgeois, and clergy who fled the First French
Republic from 1789 to 1800, some of them with the intent to find allies for an
armed return to restore the old order.2 Interestingly, because of the émigrés,
Britain (which had had its constitutional revolution a century before the
French) would then adopt the legal distinction between citizens and aliens
that the French Revolution had induced: the Aliens Act of 1793 allowed for
the arbitrary expulsion of non-British residents deemed undesirable.3

1 Douglas Bradburn, The Citizenship Revolution: Politics and the Creation of the
American Union, 1774–1804 (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press,
2009); Pierre Nora, ‘Nation’, in François Furet and Mona Ozouf, Kritisches
Wörterbuch der Französischen Revolution (Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp, 1996),
1221–1237.
2 Roger Dupuy, La Noblesse entre l’exil et la mort (Rennes, France: Éditions Ouest-
France, 1989); Philip Mansel in Kirsty Carpenter (ed.), The French Émigrés in
Europe and the Struggle against Revolution (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan,
1999).
3 Callum Whittaker, ‘“La Généreuse Nation!” Britain and the French Emigration
1792–1802’ (Master’s thesis, University of York, 2012), 54. https://www.academia.
edu/2909048/_La_Généreuse_Nation_Britain_and_the_French_Emigration_1792_
1802?auto=download (accessed 17 January 2017).
 Refugees and migrants: 1789–1938 9
These émigrés, who are, presumably, often disregarded by historians for
their anti-Republican pedigree, were the first explicitly political exiles and are
thus crucial for the history of asylum. As members of social elites who
engaged in a vigorous conflict with the newly inaugurated regime, they not
only fled persecution (or, in this case, the abolishment of what they regarded
as their birthright), but also constituted an exiled diaspora that claimed to be
a better representation of the country. The Republic’s intended answer to such
claims was the first ever codification of the right of asylum. Although it was
never actually adopted, the democratic constitution of 1793 declared that the
Republic ‘offers asylum to strangers banned from their fatherland for the
cause of liberty. It denies it to tyrants’.4 It was not by accident that this
paragraph was included in the chapter about the Republic’s relations to other
states. In its emphatic political codification, asylum would be granted to indivi­
duals who shared the values and principles of the Republic, which, for its part,
would risk diplomatic tensions with the persecuting – presumably tyrannical –
countries. Granting asylum was no longer an act of charity, but of active soli­
darity. It was not universal humanitarianism that defined who was eligible, but
the Republic, i.e. the état nation. Asylum would be accorded to those who would
be considered peers, as bearers of similar political ideals, and whose admission
would not endanger positive international relations with countries deemed
beneficial. The case of the émigrés also established the first of many West/East
cleavages. Not only would the émigrés search for assistance and support in the
still-monarchist German and Austrian territories but in the transition from the
Republic to the first French Empire, it would soon be autocratic Russia that
became the ‘Great Nation’s’ – and ‘Europe’s’ – primary enemy.
Hence, it came as no surprise that the Polish insurgents who formed a national
government and waged war against the Russian Empire in the autumn of 1830
were quick to contact British and French diplomatic representatives to secure
asylum in case of failure. When the insurgence was finally defeated in early Sep­
tember 1831, some of the 50,000 soldiers, civilians, and remnants of the national
government who had left Russian territory for Prussia and the Habsburg mon­
archy, felt compelled to come to France. Horace Sébastiani, then minister of for­
eign affairs, declared French support for the insurgents, and the French
government granted a considerable sum of money to cover travel expenses
through the German states, while Prussia and Austria organized (and prescribed)
itineraries and visas. Although most of the former insurgents – about 40,000 –
would make use of the amnesty of 11 November 1831 that was granted to all
insurgents except for officers and civilians affiliated with the national government,
French authorities seem to have been surprised by the scale of the ‘Great Emi­
gration’, which numbered about 8,500 men and a few women in France alone.5

4 Constitution de l’an I (1793). http://mjp.univ-perp.fr/france/co1793.htm (accessed

17 January 2017).
5 Hans Henning Hahn, ‘Die Diplomatie des Hôtel Lambert 1837–1847’, in Jahrbücher
für Geschichte Osteuropas, Neue Folge 21 (Stuttgart, Germany: Franz Steiner Verlag,
10 Michael G. Esch
Famously, the former insurgents, now refugees, were enthusiastically received
by German national liberals along their way; in almost every town designated as
a transit station, a ‘Polenverein’, a committee for the support of the brothers for
the cause of freedom and liberty, was formed. In France, the reception – at least
in the beginning – was rather hearty also, which did not prevent the government
from accommodating most of the refugees in dépôts, military barracks in south­
ern France, in order to keep them away from a potentially subversive public. In
both cases, this welcome was due to the impression that the Poles shared the same
liberal, constitutional, parliamentarian convictions that many Germans – espe­
cially German students – professed and that was compatible to the liberal con­
stitutionalism that legitimized Louis Philippe’s status as king of the French. In
other words, the welcoming of these refugees was consistent with their repre­
sentation as comrades in the struggle for liberty that was predominantly for­
warded by the Republican left. Beyond the political arena, it was also induced by
the exoticism and aura of these strangers.6 Their position as combatants addi­
tionally determined their representation in the German public imagination: the
liberal–democratic Freiburger Zeitung, for instance, called them ‘brothers’, ‘vic­
tims of the struggle for liberty’, and ‘heroes’. But it was obvious that the refugees
were, first and foremost, a projection screen for the imaginaries of their suppor­
ters – culminating in benevolent embraces by German students that were com­
pletely unsolicited and even against the explicit wishes of these refugees.7
One of the decisive aspects of the Polish Great Emigration to France was
the fact that most of the former insurgents were considered to be soldiers:
they received subsidies in the form of regular pay, and according to two pay
grades, distinguishing privates and officers. As Gérard Noiriel has pointed
out, this apparently generous support of strangers was associated with a cer­
tain transfer of personal autonomy to the state. It established control through
assistance as a basic form of domination: not only would any beneficiary be
forced to prove his entitlement to the payments but, according to the law of
24 April 1832 that accompanied the dissolution of the dépôts, he would also
be assigned a dwelling place, thus losing his freedom of movement.8 Even in
Britain, which had been reluctant to receive Polish refugees as such, but did
not impose any restrictions when these refugees tried to enter the Isles, the
government, in 1834, granted annual allowances for up to 500 Polish refugees
who were devoid of personal means of subsistence, but refused to include any

1973), 345–374, at p. 355; Sławomir Kalembka, Wielka Emigracja. Polskie

wychodźstwo polityczne w latach 1831–1862 [The Great Emigration. Polish Political
Refugees 1831–1862] (Warsaw: Wiedza Powszechna, 1971) 6, 16.
6 Kalembka, Wielka Emigracja, 41.
7 ‘Polenfest’, Freiburger Zeitung 39, 8 February 1832; ‘Polenfest’, Freiburger Zeitung
40, 9 February 1832; ‘Polenfest’, Freiburger Zeitung 41, 10 February 1832; ‘Pole­
nfest’, Freiburger Zeitung 42, 11 February 1832.
8 Gerárd Noiriel, Réfugiés et sans-papiers: La République face au droit d’asile XIXe–
XXe siècle (Paris: Pluriel, 1998), 46; Gérard Noiriel, État, nation et immigration: Vers
une histoire du pouvoir (Paris: Belin, 2001), 269.
 Refugees and migrants: 1789–1938 11
new beneficiaries when subsequent refugees arrived after 1863. Here also, the
amount of the subsidies depended on military rank and, additionally, on the
eventual degree of mutilation suffered during the uprising.9
The French law of 1832 was meant as a transitory measure, until the former
insurgents would be integrated into the Légion étrangère or located more
permanently otherwise.10 Though initially applicable only for one year, it was
renewed every year throughout the 1830s and established a regime that separated
refugees from ‘ordinary’ migrants – including the civilian members of the Great
Emigration. This new institution, functioning as an instrument for the state to
influence and control migrants – whose beneficiaries were all the more suspect as
they had already proven themselves to be militant political activists – immedi­
ately yielded suspicions of abuse. French authorities complained that according
to the requests for assistance, the Polish insurgent army seemed to have consisted
mainly of officers.11 Obviously, these authorities were unaware that it was in fact
mostly the Polish officers who had come to France, being exempt from the
amnesty declared on 1 November 1831, while the vast majority of the insurgents
had already returned to former Congress Poland in the winter of 1831/1832.
The next ‘refugee crisis’ corresponded to the repression of democratic and
socialist thought in Russia, the Habsburg Empire, and the German Reich,
culminating after the defeat of the revolts and revolutions of 1848/1849. The
most important refugee groups – besides the Polish, Czech, and Russian
participants in the European revolutions and revolts of 1848/1849 – were now
primarily Germans, as well as Italians, Spaniards, and Hungarians. Most of
these refugees assembled in the Western capitals, most notably in Brussels,
London, and Paris, but some also fled – as did some Hungarian and Polish
revolutionaries – into the Ottoman Empire, where conversion to Islam
facilitated rapid social ascension.12 Unlike their predecessors, most of these
political refugees were participants of neither provisional governments nor
insurgent armies, but (apart from some intellectuals and internationally
renowned writers, such as Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx from Germany and
Lajos Kossuth from Hungary) politicized, self-confident young craftsmen.13
Not all refugees considered themselves exiles: most of the Czechs who had

9 Krzysztof Marchlewicz, ‘Continuities and Innovation: Polish Emigration after 1849’,

in Sabine Freitag and Rudolf Muhs (eds), Exiles from European Revolutions: Refu­
gees in Mid-Victorian England (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), 103–120, at p.
107; Milosz K. Cybowski, The Polish Questions in British Politics and Beyond, 1830–
1847 (PhD diss., University of Southampton, 2016), 151. (https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/
403552/) (accessed 11 April 2019)
10 Kalembka, Wielka Emigracja, 39.
11 Noiriel, Réfugiés et sans-papiers, 69.
12 See Kazimierz Dopierała, ‘Polska diaspora w Turcji’ [The Polish Diaspora in
Turkey], in Adam Walaszek (ed.), Polska diaspora (Kraków, Poland: Wydawn.
Literackie, 2001), 368–377.
13 Jerzy Wojciech Borejsza, Patriota bez paszportu [Patriot without a Passport]
(Warsaw: Neriton, 2008); Maria Złotorzycka, Jarosław Da˛ browski, in Polski
Słownik Biograficzny 5 (1939–1946): 8–9.
12 Michael G. Esch
participated in the uprisings and subsequently gone to Britain after having
been amnestied did so in the spirit of abandoning revolutionary politics alto­
gether. They became ‘ordinary’ migrants, while those who chose to remain
active militants generally stayed on the mainland or became highly mobile
transnational actors.14
Suspicions rose, particularly in Belgium and Britain, with the arrival of
German craftsmen who, more often than not, confessed socialist if not anarchist
attitudes. In many instances, they re-established their revolutionary associations
in exile, rapidly acquiring an undeclared status of undesirability. In Britain, the
Aliens Acts of 1848–1850 facilitated the rejection of supposed radicals at the
borders but mostly treated refugees on the same terms as other migrants, as did
the American states.15 In other words, there was simply no special category of
migrants and thus no special treatment in terms of assistance or residence status.
But British liberalism and a vivid sense of sovereignty also prevented any
repressive measures – from 1823 to 1905, no foreigner was expelled from the
British Isles. Beyond that, the British government refused the introduction of
new passports with signalements, i.e. a conclusive description of the bearer,
because it could be harmful for political refugees.16
Because the German refugees were at times – in terms of public discourse –
more visible than other migrants, they were under closer observation, espe­
cially if they did not comply with the expected humility and gratitude towards
their hosts: French authorities feared them as troublemakers, and many a free
Englishman was irritated by the self-confident manner and sociocultural atti­
tude of these strangers. British authorities reacted by providing financial and
logistic assistance to any of those refugees willing to move to the Americas.17
In France, the control of in-migration and of applications for social assistance
were intensified; Hungarians and Italians were often rejected because they
had already been admitted to other countries. As of 1834, German craftsmen
were forbidden access to Paris – as Polish insurgents had been two years
before.18 Belgium, which was also under a liberal government, feared reprisals
from its mighty eastern neighbour, and even accepted lists from the Prussian
secret police of possible asylum applicants who were then refused from
entering Belgian territory.19 In virtually all of these cases, the granting of
asylum was a humanitarian concession that could be revoked at any time –
both instances representing a confirmation of the concept of national

14 Ivan Pfaff, ‘The Politics of Czech Liberation in Britain after 1849’, in Freitag and
Muhs, Exiles from European Revolutions (cf. Chapter 9), 135–146.
15 Klaus J. Bade, Europa in Bewegung. Migration vom späten 18. Jahrhundert bis zur
Gegenwart (Munich, Germany: C.H. Beck, 2000), 202.
16 Andreas Fahrmeir, Citizens and Aliens: Foreigners and the Law in Britain and the
German States 1789–1870 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), 132.
17 Bade, Europa in Bewegung, 205.
18 Ibid., 193.
19 Ibid., 198; Frank Caestecker, Alien Policy in Belgium, 1840–1940: The Creation of
Guest Workers, Refugees and Illegal Aliens (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), 8.
 Refugees and migrants: 1789–1938 13
sovereignty. As the granting of asylum was also one of the benchmarks of
political liberalism and thus a proof of legitimacy for the nation state, asylum
provided a relatively secure residential status, sometimes supported but often
tenuous and demanding. It should be stressed again, though, that Britain,
with its complete absence of regulations and restrictions on immigration,
residence, and expulsion procedures, remained the safest haven for refugees
throughout the nineteenth century.20

Revolutionary exiles and mass migrations

The cleavage between subaltern refugees/emigrants and policy makers from
the privileged classes that opened up after 1848/1849 would widen as workers’
movements, socialism, and anarchism gained force in Europe and abroad at a
time that also witnessed the emergence of mass migration movements from
east to west. It was no wonder that political alliances became even less
obvious and unambiguous when the social background of the refugees chan­
ged from nobility to peasantry and labouring classes.21 When another major
Polish uprising was defeated in 1864, the arrival of new Polish refugees took
place under completely different circumstances: after the reforms by Alex­
ander II in 1861 and the re-establishment of the Bonaparte Empire in 1851/
1852, political polarizations did not revolve around the question of republic
or monarchy, but between blossoming capitalism and various forms of soci­
alism. Just like the Germans before them, the new Polish refugees were not
members of political, social, and cultural elites, but subalterns who began to
organize themselves into an ideological framework that threatened not only the
establishments of their home countries, but those of their receiving countries as
well: more often than not, these political emigrants were considered distributors
of anarchism and socialism, and promoters of the International Working Men’s
Association that was formed in 1864.
The welcoming was thus much cooler than it had been before: in Austria,
any involvement in anti-Russian propaganda or the anti-Russian uprising from
within Austria was also considered to be anti-Austrian; insurgents from the
Russian region of former Poland were hence considered to have committed
high treason, refugees were screened and eventually incarcerated.22
Already in February 1864, a state of emergency was declared for Galicia,
which lasted until November 1865. In Prussia, 148 insurgents were tried in
court, 11 of them receiving the death penalty. In both countries – each of
which had played a role in the partitioning of Poland – the refugees were
interned; in 1864, Austria sent several hundred of them to Mexico to reinforce

20 Bernard Porter, ‘The Asylum of Nations: Britain and the Refugees of 1848’, in Frei­
tag and Muhs, Exiles from European Revolutions (cf. Chapter 9), 43–56, at p. 44.
21 Marchlewicz, ‘Continuities and Innovation’, 107.
22 Börries Kuzmany, Brody: Eine galizische Grenzstadt im langen 19. Jahrhundert
(Vienna: Böhlau, 2011), 235.
14 Michael G. Esch
the occupying French and Austrian troops.23 In Britain, opinions were divi­
ded: while many craftsmen, and some reformists such as Edmond Beales24
(an activist for workers’ rights and chairman of the National League for the
Independence of Poland) embraced the Polish refugees as brothers, the nobi­
lity and numerous bankers had already become rather annoyed with an
uprising that had considerably hampered what had been burgeoning business
with Russia.25 France allotted considerable funding for the new refugees, as it
had done in 1832. Public assistance, which again depended on the recognition
of the applicants by exile organizations, was once more imposed by native
supporters – and a strange but not wholly unexpected alliance was formed:
leftist Bonapartists, the Republican opposition, and the French Catholic
Church. The government ceased payments immediately for any Pole who
participated in the Paris Commune of 187126 – as was the case of former
Polish insurgent commanders Walery Wróblewski and Jarosław Da˛browski,
who were leading figures of the Commune.27
‘Political refugee’ was, in the perspective of state agencies, a political and
administrative double category that designated migrants who were entitled to
favourable treatment and status. Yet, it also constituted a group that, both
socially and politically, was simultaneously necessary, suspicious, and poten­
tially dangerous. In the case of the Poles, it contained former and/or possible
future allies, but also a considerable nuisance to international relations. The
institutionalized diaspora also differentiated between emigrants and
‘common’ migrants. But here, a line was drawn between those who adhered to
exile organizations and those who did not.28
However, all categorizations were problematic at best, and would remain so.
Even during the Great Emigration, politically motivated emigration could
merge into betterment migration, for instance, through resettlement programs
to the Americas encouraged by Western European states and parts of the exiled

23 Jerzy W. Borejsza, Emigracja polska po Powstaniu styczniowym [The Polish Emigration

after the January Uprising] (Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawn. Naukowe, 1966), 17–37.
24 See entry for Edmond Beales, in Thompson Cooper, Dictionary of National Bio­
graphy, 1885–1900, Vol. 4. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Beales,_Edmond_(DNB00)
(accessed 11 April 2019).
25 Borejsza, Emigracja polska po Powstaniu, 30–31. Borejsza claims that the British
government nonetheless hastily dropped the mention of ‘Allowances for Polish
refugees’ from the budget plan when Russia abolished the ‘Kingdom of Poland’ in
1867/1868, to avoid any irritation on the part of the Russians (see National
Archives, PMG 53). According to the National Archives, however, ‘Allowances for
Polish Refugees and Distressed Spaniards’ were on the budget from 1865 way into
the early twentieth century. http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/browse/r/h/
C11709 (accessed 11 April 2019).
26 AN F15 (Hospices et secours), nos 4224, 4225, 4226.
27 Michael G. Esch, Parallele Gesellschaften und soziale Räume: Osteuropäische Einwan­
derer in Paris 1880–1940 (Frankfurt, Germany: Campus, 2012), 482; Borejsza, Patriota
bez paszportu; Daniel Granine, Dombrowski (Paris: Les Editeurs Français Réunis,
1956).
28 Borejsza, Emigracja polska po Powstaniu, 39.
 Refugees and migrants: 1789–1938 15
diaspora, or with integration into the Légion étrangère or the national work­
force. Those who accepted overseas migration might still enter the local dia­
sporas or ethnic communities, but they lost their understanding of themselves
as political exiles: those who maintained claims to influence politics in their
homeland preferred to stay near it. Inversely, migrants, or even tourists, could
transform into politically active members of the diaspora, be it in its nationa­
listic or socialist factions, and become political exiles. This was particularly true
after 1870, when the mass migration of peasants and craftsmen merged with
the earlier political migrations. This merging could lead to a filling of the ranks
of the diasporas, which were constantly subject to attrition as members came to
opt for full integration or further migration. It could also lead to a kind of
politicization that was not oriented towards the former homelands: particularly
in the Americas, where labour and betterment migration was prevalent and
defined migration regimes, subsequent waves of labour migrants – in the
United States, Irish, German and Eastern Jewish, Polish, and Italian – formed
and shaped what would become the branches of North American syndicalism
and workers’ movements from the trade unions to anarchist organizations, the
International Working People’s Association, and the International Workers of
the World.29 The states reacted by intensifying and systematizing expulsion as a
means of getting rid of politically or socially unwanted aliens.30

Threats from the east: Russian revolutionaries and mass migration

Some groups of migrants who left their home countries for political reasons –
mostly because they either risked prosecution for or deemed political activity
impossible – ‘enjoyed’ relatively intense representation in the generalized
public sphere without being assigned a particular status. These would include
Russian revolutionaries, especially after the repression of the Narodniks’
efforts, in 1874, of ‘going to the people’.31 The Russian revolutionaries did
not come in waves, but individually; peasants, craftsmen, and students,
Christian and Jewish alike, were often politicized during their time abroad
and only then entered the milieu of the radical opposition against the auto­
cratic regime. Nonetheless, they formed a seemingly distinctive group with a
specific and peculiar public representation that lasted – not without

29 See Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1984); Kenyon Zimmer, Immigrants against the State: Yiddish and Italian
Anarchists in America (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2015); Irwin Yel­
lowitz, ‘Jewish Immigrants and the American Labour Movement, 1900–1920’, in
American Jewish History 71, 2 (1981): 188–217.
30 Frank Caestecker, ‘The Transformation of Nineteenth-Century West European
Expulsion Policy, 1880–1914’, in Andreas Fahrmeir, Olivier Faron, and Patrick
Weil (eds), Migration Control in the North Atlantic World: The Evolution of State
Practices in Europe and the United States from the French Revolution to the Inter-War
Period (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), 120–137.
31 See Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist
Movements in Nineteenth-Century Russia (London: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960).
16 Michael G. Esch
transformation – from the late 1870s to the dawn of the First World War:
the Parisian police, for example, filed pertinent reports under ‘Chez les
nihilistes russes’ in the 1880s, ‘Chez les terroristes russes’ in the 1900s, and
under ‘Chez les révolutionnaires russes germanophiles’ around 1917.32
However, the ‘Russians’ in fact consisted of different milieus with diver­
gent class backgrounds that often had little or no contact with each other.
The first revolutionaries – namely those who followed the principles for­
mulated by Petr Lavrov, who, since 1870, lived mostly in Paris and partici­
pated in the Commune – organized in small circles and kept in close
contact, studying, discussing, and helping each other when needed. Their
righteousness, determined behaviour, and asceticism attracted some atten­
tion – as did the fact that their male and female members communicated on
equal footing.33 They mostly maintained distance from local politics, though
this did not prevent national police forces from being interested in what they
were doing. The French Sûreté, for example, employed several agents,
occasionally well-informed, who reported regularly about the proceedings of
the Russian ‘nihilists’ and the ‘colony’; the same goes for the Préfecture de
police.34 The growing fear of social unrest as embodied in the growing
socialist workers’ organizations, and particularly the chimera of an orga­
nized transnational anarchist terrorism, resulted in various forms of formal
and informal international police cooperation concerned with the preven­
tion and/or control of politically active migrants. And doubtlessly there were
some Russian exiles, mostly of the subaltern classes, who adopted the life­
style of the anarchistes-illégalistes and thus integrated themselves into spe­
cific domestic subcultures. In the United States, migrants from Germany
and the Russian Empire were among the most avid and active anarchist
militants. But the paranoia that motivated the International Anti-Anarchist
Conference in Rome in 1898 and the International Conference for the Social
Defence Against Anarchists in St. Petersburg in 1904 was above all a moral
panic to legitimize measures against unwanted immigrants. After the anar­
chist Leon Czołgosz assassinated US President William McKinley in 1901,
the US Congress adopted the Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903, a bill that
excluded several groups of immigrants – notwithstanding the fact that
Czołgosz was born in the United States from Polish immigrant parents and
thus not an immigrant himself. Furthermore, the act excluded not only
supposed anarchists, but also

paupers; persons likely to become a public charge; professional beggars;

persons afflicted with a loathsome or with a dangerous contagious dis­
ease; persons who have been convicted of a felony or other crime or

32 Archives Nationales F7 (Sûreté Générale).

33 Daniela Neumann, Studentinnen aus dem Russischen Reich in der Schweiz (1867–
1914) (Zurich, Switzerland: Chronos Verlag, 1987); Esch, Parallele Gesellschaften.
34 AN F7 12519; numerous dossiers about individual Russians in APP B/A.
 Refugees and migrants: 1789–1938 17
misdemeanour involving moral turpitude; polygamists; prostitutes, and
persons who procure or attempt to bring in prostitutes or women for the
purpose of prostitution.35

It obliged immigrants who had not paid for their passage themselves to
prove that they did not belong to the ‘excluded classes’, and it allowed the
expulsion of any migrant deemed illegal. The Anarchist Exclusion Act did,
however, state that ‘nothing in this act shall exclude persons convicted of an
offense purely political, not involving moral turpitude’.36 The ‘real’ political
refugee was thus a person of irreproachable manners and respectable pedi­
gree. The exclusion of prostitutes and pimps also refers to a similar con­
temporary campaign against ‘white slave traders’, i.e. the suppliers of
(presumably forced) prostitutes for brothels in the Americas, who were very
often of Galician or Russian Jewish descent. Recent studies indicate that the
debate was mostly a moral panic aiming at redefining migration and sexu­
ality regimes.37
At the same time, things got worse for Russian revolutionaries in Europe as
well. As early as the French–Russian rapprochements of the late 1880s,
French officials turned a blind eye on the proceedings of the Zagraničnaja
agentura or Ochranka, the foreign branch of the Russian political police
(Ochrana). Their headquarters were set up in 1885 in the Russian Embassy in
Paris but they also operated in England, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, and
Italy (with a focus on Paris, London, and Berlin) performing various types of
covert operations, from the gathering of information to ‘black ops’-style
bombings of newspapers in cities with considerable Russian oppositional
communities.38 After the anti-anarchist conferences of 1898 and 1904 and the

35 Immigration Act of 3 March 1903, Section 2. Cited after: Reports of the Immi­
gration Commission: Immigration Legislation, presented by Mr Dillingham,
Washington, DC, 1911, 103f. https://archive.org/details/cu31924021134204/page/
n8?q=Reports+of+the+Immigration+Commission%3A+Immigration+Legislation
(accessed 11 April 2019).
36 Ibid.
37 Brian Donovan, White Slave Crusades: Race, Gender and Anti-Vice Activism
1887–1917 (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006). Interestingly, this was
not the last instance where the fear of terrorism was linked to the supposed forced
trafficking of young women. See Pardis Mahdavi, From Trafficking to Terror.
Constructing a Global Social Problem (New York: Routledge, 2014), 4–8 passim.
38 V.I. Agafonov, Zagraničnaja Ochranka. Sostavleno po sekretnym dokumentam
Zagraničnoj Agentury u Departamenta Policii [Ochrana Abroad. Collected from
the Secret Documents of the Zagraničnaja Agentura and the Police Department]
(St Petersburg, Russia: Kniga, 1918); Richard J. Johnson, ‘Zagranichnaia Agentura:
The Tsarist Political Police in Europe’, in Journal of Contemporary History 7 (1972):
221–242.
18 Michael G. Esch
migration control regimes they implemented,39 agencies like these became
officially recognized. Even before that, the Agentura was able to rely not just
on the close cooperation of individual officers in the local police who were
on its payroll, but also on the local police administrations themselves. The
existence of the Agentura came to public knowledge only when Stanisław
Padlewski, a Polish socialist revolutionary, shot Russian former police general
Michail D. Seliverstov in Paris.40 This type of interference of persecuting
countries in the asylum regime of the receiving countries was not entirely
new: as we have already seen, smaller and less-powerful countries were often
anxious to balance their self-esteem as liberal democracies or republics
against the possible anger and repercussions of the powers that emigrants
were fleeing from. The same goes for Tsarist covert ops: beginning in the
1860s, Le Nord, a Belgian newspaper that was financed by Russian authorities,
stirred up public opinion against Polish ‘terrorists’.41
Some exile organizations reacted by creating similarly clandestine structures:
the Russian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (PSR) operated a counter­
intelligence branch in Paris, run mainly by Vladimir L. Burcev, a former member
of the Narodnaja Volja, the organization that had assassinated the Tsar in 1881
in the hope of triggering a general uprising and the introduction of free speech.
Burcev exposed Ochrana agents provocateurs and was the main accuser in a
secret trial against Evno F. Azev, leader of the Combat Organization of the PSR
since 1904 and presumed double agent. The trial, which was held secretly in
Paris in early 1909 and led to a death sentence against Azev (who flew to
London before the trial’s conclusion), showed that political exiles – just like the
secret police of the Tsar – tended to consider themselves extraterritorial. This
was even true for the migrant syndicates in France or in the United States, which
not only intersected class and ethnicity but also fought their battles mainly
against entrepreneurs that had come from the same country and adhered to the
same religion. In later years, particularly during the First World War, the older
exiles and agitators would even try to prevent younger, more enthusiastic (and
ultimately more integrated) migrants from active politics concerning life in the
host country: while the former wanted to respect the laws of hospitality, the

39 The most striking example, but not the only one, being the cited American
Immigration Act of 1903. See Edward P. Hutchinson, Legislative History of
American Immigration Policy, 1798–1965 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Penn­
sylvania Press, 1981); Mary S. Barton, ‘The Global War on Anarchism: The
United States and International Anarchist Terrorism, 1898–1904’, in Diplomatic
History 39, 2 (2015): 303–330.
40 Esch, Parallele Gesellschaften, 460. The director of the Agentura at that time was
Petr I. Račkovskij. Seliverstov was not, as some Parisian newspapers stated, the
head of the Agentura, but he had been the head of the žandarmerija in 1878 and
then seems to have volunteered for the observation of the Russians abroad. See
Anatolij F. Koni, Vospominanija o Very Zasulič [Memories of Vera Zasulič]
(Moscow: Gos. Izd. jurid. lit., 1959). http://az.lib.ru/k/koni_a_f/text_0660.shtml.
The assumption however made the existence of the Agentura public.
41 Borejsza, Emigracja polska po Powstaniu, 41.
 Refugees and migrants: 1789–1938 19
latter considered that revolutionaries should instigate the revolution no matter
where they lived – thus often making the first step of integrating themselves into
the workers’ movements of the countries they lived in.42

The construction of a new type of refugee: Jews in the late

nineteenth century
The latter was especially true for another group of migrants from the east
who intersected with the migration of Russian students and revolutionaries
who travelled west from the early 1880s onwards: Jewish migrants from the
Russian Empire who left their homes due to pogroms and a tide of anti-
Semitism after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. The first waves
of Jewish migrants from the east can easily be considered as the first modern
European refugee crisis, as refugees from Russia and Romania arrived in
unexpectedly large numbers at the borders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
According to Börries Kuzmany, the border town of Brody, with approxi­
mately 20,000 mostly Jewish inhabitants, faced a sudden influx of nearly
15,000 refugees in the course of only a couple of weeks. The citizens of Brody
initially reacted in very much the same way as the Germans, French, and
British had to the advent of the Polish exiles in 1831/1832: some of the weal­
thier townspeople formed a committee that organized shelter and provisions;
at the same time, they strove for international solutions on behalf of the
refugees.43 As was often the case during the nineteenth century, all attempts
to reach European agreement went via Paris. Here, the Consistoire israélite
tried to sensitize national and international public opinion with a variety of
methods, including advertising the accommodation of 500 Jewish refugees in
newly built houses in the 18th arrondissement, which the Rothschild Foundation

42 See Esch, Parallele Gesellschaften; Eric L. Hirsch, Urban Revolt: Ethnic Politics in
the Nineteenth-Century Chicago Labor Movement (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1990); Kenyon Zimmer, Immigrants against the State: Yiddish
and Italian Anarchism in America (Champagne, IL: University of Illinois Press,
2015). See a general comparison of Jewish migrant textile workers in Paris and
New York in Nancy L. Green, Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work: A Century of
Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press Books, 1997).
43 Kuzmany, Brody: Eine galizische Grenzstadt, 237–246; Börries Kuzmany, ‘Das jüdische
Brody. Ein europäischer Transferraum’, in Petra Ernst and Gerald Lamprecht (eds),
Jewish Spaces. Die Kategorie Raum im Kontext kultureller Identitäten (Innsbruck, Aus­
tria: Studien Verlag, 2010), 103–123. Kuzmany directly compared the situation in 1881/
1882 directly with the ‘crisis’ of 2016: Blaise Gauquelin and Börries Kuzmany, ‘On peut
comparer la crise des réfugiés juifs de 1881 avec celle de 2015”’, in Libération, 4 January
2016, 22; https://www.liberation.fr/planete/2016/01/04/borries-kuzmany-on-peut-compa
rer-la-crise-des-refugies-juifs-de-1881-avec-celle-de-2015_1424259.
20 Michael G. Esch
had originally intended for poor Parisians in 1882.44 The activists at the Rus­
sian–Galician border also initiated efforts to coordinate the accommodation of
these refugees on a European and transatlantic scale. Just like later initiatives of
its kind, they failed completely because no European government was inclined
to guarantee more than a rather symbolic quota of quite narrowly defined
refugees.45 Obviously, the sovereign control over any addition to the national
population was a central building block of modern statehood. This is far from
astonishing when we consider that the late nineteenth century was not only the
heyday of ‘classical’ nationalism, but also of a ‘nationalization of the masses’
that went far beyond a mere ideologization of personal and collective identity.46
The inauguration of the welfare state, initiated as a means of avoiding violent
class conflict, bound the social classes together in a far more convincing way
than a sole bond between individual and constitutional state, where ‘la majes­
tueuse égalité des lois … interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les
ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain’.47 As Noiriel has pointed out,
these new nations also reached for new and more effective ways of controlling –
i.e. engendering and preventing – in-migration.48
This was true even for the refugees and migrants themselves: contrary to the
case of the Polish exiles, the mobilizing and community-building motive was
not the adherence to cultural and political elite circles envisaging democratiza­
tion. The common denominator now was religion/race as an identity marker
that superseded class and milieu: wealthy bourgeois and traders helped ‘their’
mostly proletarian and petit bourgeois fellow brethren who – not least because
of upcoming anti-Semitism and pogroms – would become compatriots-to-be
with the declaration of Zionism. As in other cases, it was also, above all, the
members of these social elites who shaped the perception of and attributed
identity to the migrants concerned. It fitted well into this kind of assistance –
where it was no longer brothers helping brothers in need, but where the more
fortunate ones fulfilled their duty of care – that the Jewish refugees were the
first to be considered as passive victims of undeserved oppression. As Hannah
Arendt stated, when considering refugees after the First World War, they did
not flee because of something they had done or wanted to do, but because of
what they unchangeably were49 – or were supposed to be. But in more ways

44 Béatrice Philippe, Les Juifs à Paris à la Belle Epoque (Paris: Albin Michel, 1992),
34; Nancy L. Green, The Pletzl of Paris: Jewish Immigrant Workers in the Belle
Epoque (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1986), 103.
45 Kuzmany, Brody: Eine galizische Grenzstadt, 242.
46 George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and
Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich
(New York: Howard Fertig, 1975).
47 ‘The majestic equality of rights forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges,
to beg in the streets and to steal bread.’ See Anatole France, Le Lys rouge (Paris:
Calman-Lévy, 1894), 81.
48 Noiriel, État, nation et immigration, 128–132, 275–278, 289–307.
49 Cited after Peter Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2015), 52. See also Bade, Europa in Bewegung, 209.
 Refugees and migrants: 1789–1938 21
than one, the definition of the Jewish refugee from the east singled out a spe­
cific group from a system of mass migration movements,50 constructing not
only a discursive and administrative category, but also creating the overcoming
of class though national unity and defining a superior Western humanitarian
liberalism in opposition to Eastern barbarism and autocracy.
The fact that most Jewish migrants from the east did not openly profess any
political programs (at least not initially) did not prevent them, time and again,
from becoming a blueprint for sometimes contradictory discursive projections
of victimhood, refugeedom, and danger. This high degree of visibility was
attributed to several factors that partially linked these new refugees to their
more visibly activist predecessors. Since the rise of Russian anarchist populism
in the 1870s, Russian revolutionaries were held in high esteem in leftist repub­
lican–democratic and socialist circles. Their popularity was, as always, highly
ambivalent, as their representation oscillated from selfless fighters against
autocratic oppression and for the rights of the peasant poor, to scroungers,
bomb throwers, and troublemakers. Very quickly, this imagery was expanded
and applied to virtually all Russian students in Europe, including those who
left Russia legally for studies abroad and did not enter any political or revolu­
tionary circles.51 Thus some landlords or – in Paris – concierges would deem
everyone coming from the east and displaying strange (thus suspicious) beha­
viour as revolutionary agitators; at times, a concierge would confuse vodka
with ether, or evening soirees in a flat with friends with conspiratorial
meetings. On the other hand, the public imagination surrounding the
Russian revolutionaries, with all their attributed exoticism and adventurism,
was also accessible to migrant youths who simply wanted to distinguish
themselves: in 1904, two students who had insulted passers-by and urinated
in the streets of the Quartier Latin claimed to be Russian anarchists.52 When
the Russian ‘colony’ had grown considerably after the revolution of 1905
was defeated and a subsequent new wave of Jewish and non-Jewish refugees
and migrants appeared, the Parisian police took a closer look at what they
deemed the Russian opposition abroad. As a detailed report stated, most
Russian revolutionaries kept away from domestic politics and lived frugally
in small student collectives, dining mostly in self-organized cantines that
also provided meals for indigent students, but they were not the only ones.
Acquiring student status was easy for revolutionaries and other exiles from
educated families and provided a relatively safe residence status. Also, the
authorities accepted documents translated by fellow Russian students. The
police found an exorbitantly high percentage of matriculated students who
did not possess the required qualifications and actually had never intended

50 Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium

(London: Duke University Press, 2002), 331–365.
51 Hartmut Rüdiger Peter (ed.), Schnorrer, Verschwörer, Bombenwerfer? Studenten aus
dem Russischen Reich an deutschen Hochschulen vor dem 1. Weltkrieg (Frankfurt,
Germany: Peter Lang, 2001).
52 See Esch, Parallele Gesellschaften, 56–57, 242.
22 Michael G. Esch
to attend and, as a result, about 100 of 700 Russian students were expel­
led.53 Similarly, identity papers were routinely found to be forged: often for
active revolutionaries, but also for other migrants who did not possess the
required documents. The police also dismissed any clear distinction between
refugees, exiles, and ‘ordinary’ migrants, stating that of the approximately
25,000 to 40,000 Russian subjects in Paris alone, ‘all have to be considered
sympathizers of the Russian Revolution’, additionally estimating there to be
about 4,500 active ‘propagators of violence’.54 Only very few of those,
however, took the step to militant activism in France. And if they did so,
they mostly targeted tsarist institutions, officials, or – as may have been the
case in 1893 – the Tsar himself. However, for some incidents, the perpe­
trators were not always true militants but proven to be agents provocateurs
of the Zagraničnaja Agentura.55
Just as the political refugees and exiles who came before them, and maybe
even more so, Jewish migrants from the east were subject to projections,
representations, and significations that were not always congruent with the
realities of their lives. This occurred not only because of the institutionaliza­
tion of anti-Semitism, but also in the discourses of those who claimed to
speak out on their behalf, when Jewish migrants were labelled as the epitome
of the innocent and passive victims seeking refuge in the near and transat­
lantic west.56 This rather unidimensional representation was even strong
enough to exert some influence on the academic community until Jonathan
Sarna pointed out in 1981 that Jewish transatlantic migrants behaved very
much like other migrant groups, even when it came to trans-local existences
and return migration.57 Additionally, Kuzmany found the percentage of Rus­
sian Jewish refugees of 1881/1882 who re-migrated to be considerable.58 The
actual indistinguishability between refugees in the stricter sense and betterment
migrants was even obvious in the seemingly unambiguous setting of Brody in
1881/1882: Kuzmany has pointed out that migration of the Jews from the
Russian Empire was systematically promoted and encouraged by agents for
transatlantic travel who launched advertisements in Russian-Jewish

53 Michel Lesure, ‘Les réfugiés révolutionnaires russes à Paris. Rapport du Préfet de

Police au Président du Conseil 16 décembre 1907’, in Cahiers du monde russe et
soviétique 6, 3 (1965): 419–436, at pp. 424, 429.
54 Ibid., 427, 431.
55 See Rita T. Kronenbitter, ‘Paris Okhrana 1885–1905’, in Studies in Intelligence 10, 3
(1966): 55–66. https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-p
ublications/books-and-monographs/okhrana-the-paris-operations-of-the-russian-imp
erial-police/art1.pdf (accessed 10 January 2017).
56 See Kuzmany, Brody: Eine galizische Grenzstadt, 94.
57 Jonathan D. Sarna, ‘The Myth of No Return: Jewish Return Migration to Eastern
Europe, 1881–1914’, in American Jewish History 71, 2 (1981): 256–268. Another
myth concerning the mainly anti-Semitic motives behind conflicts inside the workers
movement in the US is contested in Yellowitz, ‘Jewish Immigrants’, 188–217.
58 Kuzmany, Brody: Eine galizische Grenzstadt, 243–244; 246 speaks of more than 50
per cent.
 Refugees and migrants: 1789–1938 23
newspapers promising free passage to the Americas – very much to the
annoyance of the local branches of the Jewish committee.59
As we can see, different migrant strategies – both voluntary and involun­
tary – intersected with each other. They were categorized either in charitable
and administrative practice or in public discourse according to circumstances
and actors’ intentions, which did not fully reflect the actual structure of
migrant practices. But there is no doubt that the latter were structured by
these categorizations, which were destined to make a complex social reality
amenable to state control and regulation but at the same time created new
opportunities for new migrant strategies. These migration and asylum regimes
were still highly situational and fluid, and they left numerous easily accessible
possibilities to circumvent, misuse, or transform them.

War, nationalization and juridification

During the First World War and its aftermath, the rules and frameworks for
flight and betterment migration changed drastically, mainly through the
modernizing nationalization of the spatial new order in East Central Europe,
South East Europe, and Asia Minor that would produce forced population
movements, most particularly after the Greco-Turkish War and ending with
the Lausanne Treaty of 1923. Of course, this change began before the reor­
dering of Europe: already during the war, individuals became progressively
identified with the nationalizing states they had come from, which led to a
double outcome. Citizens or subjects from now-enemy states were put into
detainment camps, while actors from the institutionalized diasporas of the
very same states sometimes gained special status via the participation of their
nations-to-be in active warfare, as was particularly the case for the Poles and
Czechs in France, Britain, and the United States. At the instigation of these
national diasporas, members of the titular nations were exempt from detain­
ment when they were accredited by the relevant exile organizations60 who
thus gained a semi-official status similar to that of Polish organizations in
France after 1832. Also, during and after the war most European countries
introduced standardized identification documents that entitled bearers to
travel to, and stay in, a country other than their country of citizenship – just
as France had done shortly after the 1789 Revolution. Passports were
required first and foremost of migrants, for whom it became a predecessor of
the general identity document that a growing number of countries would
introduce during or after the First World War: the carte d’identité in France
(1916), the Kennkarte in Germany (1938), the new British passport (1914, as
part of the Nationality and Status Aliens Act), and a British identity card

59 Ibid., 238.
60 Esch, Parallele Gesellschaften, 398; Jean-Philippe Namont, La Colonie tchécoslovaque.
Une histoire de l’immigration tchèque et slovaque en France (1914–1940) (Paris: Institut
d’Etudes Slaves, 2011), 53, 56, 63.
24 Michael G. Esch
(1939–1945). One outcome of this standardization of identity documentation
was that it became exceedingly difficult to cross national borders without
‘proper’ documents.61 Concurrently, there were increasing numbers of people
who were (or felt they were) directly or indirectly forced to leave their homes,
particularly in Eastern Europe, where the new nation states, in their endea­
vour to reach ethnic homogeneity and to occupy the largest possible territory,
produced displaced persons en masse.62 The victorious countries of the war
reacted by introducing the concept of national/ethnic minorities (as opposed
to the former nationalities in multi-ethnic empires). The latter were granted
the right to return to their homelands if they had been displaced and were to
enjoy full legal equality with the titular nation in Eastern Central Europe. At
the same time, the newly funded League of Nations accorded a rather brutal
forced ‘population exchange’ between Greece and Turkey in 1923 that was to
become a reference point for Nazi German resettlement schemes in occupied
Poland during the Second World War.63
Although forced migrations, betterment migrations, and flight from war
and oppression intersected on almost every level, it was one group of migrant
refugees that was particularly singled out and became a blueprint for refugees
to come. This accentuation was due to a specific configuration of actors, but
also to the fact that this particular migrant group constituted an entirely
novel problem: with the expatriation of 1–1.5 million Russians who had left
Russia because of the Revolution or Civil War of 1917–1921 and, in another
form, the Armenian survivors of the Turkish genocide, Europe faced a new
kind of political refugee. Namely, people who had technically lost any
allegiance or sense of belonging to their country of origin; who, in other
words, did not possess any national citizenship. Such a precarious existence
was particularly problematic in a situation where all of Europe and most of
the world had been partitioned among nation states. Russian and Armenian
refugees constituted new groups of stateless people when (and because) legal
nationality, or citizenship, had become a sine qua non to enjoy any civil rights
whatsoever.64 In some respects, the Russian refugees resembled the émigrés

61 John Torpey, ‘The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Passport System’, in
Jane Caplan and John Torpey (eds), Documenting Individual Identity: The Develop­
ment of State Practices in the Modern World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2001), 256–270; John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport. Surveillance,
Citizenship and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Noiriel,
Réfugiés et sans-papiers.
62 See Michael Schwartz, Ethnische ‘Säuberungen’ in der Moderne. Globale Wechselwir­
kungen nationalistischer und rassistischer Gewaltpolitik im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert
(Munich, Germany: Oldenbourg, 2013).
63 Onur Yildırım, Diplomacy and Displacement: Reconsidering the Turco-Greek
Exchange of Populations, 1922–1934 (New York: Routledge, 2012); Michael G. Esch,
‘Gesunde Verhältnisse’. Deutsche und polnische Bevölkerungspolitik 1939–1950
(Marburg, Germany: Herder Institut, 1997).
64 See Hoerder, Cultures in Contact, 446–454; Gatrell, The Making of the Modern
Refugee, 52–81.
 Refugees and migrants: 1789–1938 25
after the revolution of 1789: many of those who had fled not just the Civil
War but also the new regime were members of political, military, and eco­
nomic elites; some 135,000 were actually soldiers who had fought in southern
Russia and Ukraine and were evacuated via Constantinople. Similar to the
émigrés and the Poles after 1831, some considered themselves the rightful
rulers and representatives of their homeland, especially the conservative
nobility and right-wing parties, including some of the commanding officers of
the Vrangel troops who had been evacuated to Constantinople and then dis­
persed among Western countries, particularly France, by their former French
and British allies. These groups intended to return to Russia in arms and free
it once and for all from the communists. The Zemgor, a kind of institutiona­
lized civil society in ovo that had organized relief for the hundreds of thou­
sands of internally displaced people and refugees in Russia and had claimed
political leadership after the Revolution of February 1917, reconstituted in
Paris as a representative of the bourgeois ‘real’ Russia and thus of Russian
refugees after the Revolution.65 The diaspora in its entirety declared itself to
be rossija zarubeže, ‘Russia abroad’. And, similar to the émigrés, their very
existence indicated the emergence of a new and even more violent opposition
of political and societal systems: capitalism and communism. But unlike other
refugee groups with an unambiguous representation in the public sphere, they
were in fact a highly heterogeneous group held together – if at all – by their
shared origin and their particular legal status. They were not necessarily political
refugees from the Revolution, some of them weren’t even anti-Bolshevik. It was
not by accident that most refugees had fled during the Russian Civil War and the
famine of 1921; they stayed in the immediately neighbouring countries mostly
with the intention of returning as soon as the war was over. They were, thus, a
fluid mixture of emigrants, refugees, and betterment migrants cramped together
into one politicized category.
The newly founded League of Nations reacted to the advent of the Russian
refugees by appointing Fritjof Nansen as High Commissioner for Refugees in
1921. Nansen, a Norwegian, and former explorer, humanitarian activist, and
diplomat, who had already successfully organized the repatriation of 200,000
prisoners of war (POWs), was initially only responsible for the Armenians and
the Russians, so he appointed numerous Russian jurists to his bureau.66 His
main focus was the repatriation of these refugees after the Civil War in Russia
had ended, and despite the public image of the refugees as enthusiastic anti­
communists, there was at least some degree of willingness to return to what was
now Soviet Russia – even on the part of unlikely candidates, such as the 800

65 Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee, 33; Claudena M. Skran, Refugees in
Inter-War Europe. The Emergence of a Regime (Oxford: Oxford University Press
1995), 79–85.
66 Bruno Cabanes, The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism 1918–1924
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) 139; Catherine Gousseff, L’exil
russe. La fabrique du réfugié russe apatride (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2008), 52–53,
236–238.
26 Michael G. Esch
Cossacks who voluntarily re-migrated in December 1922.67 Also, the Bolshevik
government was eager to welcome a group of people that comprised highly
qualified professionals of all sorts, as long as it could decide whom to let in,
and whom not to. But as most of the countries the refugees lived in did not
recognize the Bolshevik government, negotiations were difficult. The situation
did not become any easier after the Bolsheviks decided to put pressure on the
international community by actually denaturalizing every Russian subject that
had left the country after the ‘Great October’ Revolution. Obviously, their
intention had been a different one: no less than three times between October
1921 and November 1925 the Council of People’s Commissars threatened
former Russian citizens with the loss of their citizenship if they did not register
at Soviet Russian consular missions, to the extent that those existed. In fact,
this was rarely the case as – all rhetoric about self-determination notwith­
standing – the new government was not internationally recognized.68 The
importance of a new universal and international law that was destined to end
all wars69 therefore – although indirectly – produced the largest group of refu­
gees in recorded history. Additionally, exile organizations launched a campaign
against an alleged forced repatriation that nobody could have foreseen: for the
established diaspora, every Russian who returned under Bolshevist rule
damaged its claim to represent the real Russia.70 The specific configuration of
actors and debates produced a stalemate that lasted until Soviet Russia had lost
all interest in the return of these former subjects; the ‘fabrication’ of more than
one million stateless people was thus complete.
Nansen’s office worked hard to construct a refugee status that would enable
the unfortunate to live in relative safety, to find accommodation, and to work –
with a status that would be accepted internationally. However, they only
succeeded in creating a passport specifically for Russian refugees, later also for
Armenians, to be issued by the country of residence. This document guaranteed
a certain residence status and allowed travel abroad but did not necessarily

67 Katy Long, ‘Early Repatriation Policy: Russian Refugee Return 1922–1924’, in

Journal of Refugee Studies 22, 2 (2009): 133–154.
68 Dekret Soveta Narodnich Komissarov o lišenii prav graždanstva nekotorych
kagegorii lic, nachodjaščichsja za granicej, 10 October 1921; Dekret VCIK I CNK
RSFSR o lišenii prav graždanstva nekotorych kategorii lic, nachodjaščichsja za
granicej, 12 December 1921; http://istmat.info/node/22736 and http://istmat.info/
node/46853 (accessed 11 April 2019). A third decree dating from 25 November
1925 is mentioned in Georg Geilke, Das Staatsangehörigkeitsrecht der Sowjetunion
einschließlich der geschichtlich-verfassungsrechtlichen Entwicklung der wichtigsten
Gebietseinheiten und Völkerschaften (Frankfurt. Germany: Metzner, 1964), 294,
299, 302. These decrees stipulated time limits of six months, extendable when no
consulary mission was available.
69 Cabanes, The Great War, 11–14.
70 Long, ‘Early Repatriation Policy’, 139; Esch, Parallele Gesellschaften, 265f; Cathe­
rine Gousseff, Immigrés russes en France (1900–1950). Contribution à l’histoire poli­
tique et sociale des réfugiés, unpublished dissertation (Paris: EHESS, 1996), 105f.
 Refugees and migrants: 1789–1938 27
71
permit a return to the country they had come from. Just as in the example of
nineteenth-century France, diaspora organizations – in this case the bureau of
the Kerenskij government ambassador, who was sent to Paris after the February
Revolution – accredited Russian refugees applying for the passport. And it did so
rather generously: the precarious status of a Russian refugee was sufficiently
worth aspiring to for more than a few predominantly Jewish Poles who had
come to Paris before the First World War and now, in an increasingly anti-
Semitic climate, found it difficult to see their adherence to the new Polish nation
officially acknowledged. The same procedure worked for Polish citizens who
illegally entered Paris long after 1924. The Office des réfugiés russes complied, as
it was keenly interested in representing high numbers of individuals for reasons
of legitimation and financing.72
The ‘fabrication of the stateless’ resulted in – and consisted of – several efforts
to define an internationally acknowledged universal status of these particular
refugees, and of refugees in general. This endeavour, which would ultimately fail
in the interwar period and even after the Second World War, achieved not much
more than the highly ambivalent and rarely effective Declaration of Human
Rights of 1948.73 Yet it has been labelled as a ‘revolution of rights’. Bruno
Cabanes describes how the personal experience of war and post-war suffering
incited some younger legal scholars such as René Cassin, Georges Scelle, and
André Mandelstam to establish a legislative framework for a moral order that
had been lost in the era of total war.74 This interpretation of the juridification of
rights that began after the First World War as a humanitarian process,75
although tempting, not only lacks an explanation for the ongoing crisis, use, and
misuse of human rights but it also misses some crucial points. First, it is proble­
matic to establish the Great War as the origin of total warfare. As French
historian Jean-Yves Guiomar and, after him, the American historian David
A. Bell have convincingly stressed, total war emerged as a consequence of the
republicanized and politicized warfare that followed the French Revolution.76
The war of 1914–1918 was merely a culmination point that showed what had
been awakened more than a century earlier. Consequently, not only wars, but
also frequent uprisings and unrest produced subsequent waves of political and
religious refugees. Second, as we have seen, asylum regimes throughout the
nineteenth century had been governed by an often-awkward entanglement of
secular political agendas, on behalf of state agencies, and religious or quasi­

71 Cabanes, The Great War, 140.

72 Gousseff, Immigrés russes, 105–106.
73 Peter Gatrell’s contribution to this volume.
74 Cabanes, The Great War, 307–313.
75 Christoph Menke, Birgit Kaiser, and Kathrin Thiele, ‘The “Aporias of Human
Rights” and the “One Human Right”: Regarding the Coherence of Hannah
Arendt’s Argument’, in Social Research 74, 3 (2007): 739–762.
76 Jean-Yves Guiomar, L’invention de la guerre totale, XVIIIe–XXe siècle (Paris:
Éditions du Félin, 2004); David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe
and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Boston, MA: Mariner Books, 2007).
28 Michael G. Esch
religious (universalist) charity, on behalf of humanitarian activists, who, in
the twentieth century, still very often emerged from Christian or Jewish
organizations. The shock stemming from the atrocities of the Great War and
its aftermath was not so much about the terror of some primordial vicious­
ness of human nature, but of the very nature of modernity: of an entirely
secularized world without transcendental ethics and morals, a world ruled by
the pure egotistical rationality of individuals or states – a society where ‘all
feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations have been destroyed’, replaced by ‘naked
self-interest, callous cash payment’,77 and power relations.
The juridification of human dignity via the establishment of universal human
rights in international law was thus maybe not so much revolutionary as it was
reactionary. It was, at best, highly ambivalent and hardly successful. It did not
attempt to create something new but tried to create a substitute for what had
been destroyed. It was an effort to re-establish the idyllic relations that had
been more or less irrevocably abolished in the French Revolution, when the
revolutionary republic abolished arbitrariness as an expression of despotism
along with any notion of (sovereign or religious) clemency in favour of the
strictness of the law, and in the creation of the modern, secular état nation.
Most of the pioneers of universal human rights, however, drew not only upon
their personally acquired knowledge of human suffering, but also upon their
own, often Jewish and in some cases Christian, religious backgrounds. And
they were very well aware of the non-secular provenance of their endeavour.
René Cassin, who stemmed from a Portuguese-Marranite family, would make
this very clear when he embedded the 1948 Declaration of Universal Human
Rights into the Judaeo-Christian Ten Commandments and the condemnation
of violence in Buddhism.78 The efforts to establish first an internationally
accepted status and set of rights for refugees, and then universal human rights
more generally, contained the same mixed, and even conflicting, heritage of
refugee politics and asylum regimes that stemmed from the long nineteenth
century and beyond. On the one hand, they were linked to a religiously
inspired notion of universal – thus borderless – human dignity. Somehow, this
had to be translated into the discourse of secular politics, which –despite all
transnational and international entanglements and supranational accords in an
era of ongoing globalization – drew its legitimacy from the claim that it stood
for the will of the represented – i.e. the citizens of a nation state,79 and thus not

77 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (London:
Communistischer Arbeiterbildungsverein, 1848).
78 René Cassin, ‘From the Ten Commandments to the Rights of Man’, in Shlomo
Shoham (ed.), Of Law and Man: Essays in Honour of Haim H. Cohn (New York:
Sabra Books, 1971), 13–26. Also see http://renecassin.over-blog.com/article-from
-the-ten-commandments-to-the-rights-of-man-72080499.html (accessed 25 Septem­
ber 2019).
79 Cf. on this point Wolfgang Reinhard, Geschichte der Staatsgewalt. Eine vergleichende
Verfassungsgeschichte Europas von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Munich,
Germany: C.H. Beck, 1999), 406–411.
 Refugees and migrants: 1789–1938 29
mankind as a whole. As the generalization of nation states as organizing
political and administrative bodies actually produced refugees, they came
dangerously close to setting a thief to catch a thief.
On the other hand, the ‘invention of human rights’ that would find its
apogee only after the Second World War can be described as one specific
cornerstone of a juridification process that affected migration as a whole. This
process can be divided into three components: first, the multiplication and
nationalization of borders in post-war Europe and the introduction of exclu­
sionary migration regimes such as the quota system in the United States;80
second, the establishment of official migrant support institutions by the new
nation states that offered assistance and intended to keep citizens abroad
loyal; and third, the regulation and juridification of some forms of betterment
migration in bilateral contracts that labour-importing countries such as
France, Britain, Belgium, and Germany signed with labour-exporting coun­
tries such as Italy, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Agreements on the provision
and treatment of labour migrants guaranteed working conditions and pay­
ments identical to those of the locals. Here, they followed recommendations
of the International Labour Organization (ILO), the second major migration
control and management institution founded by the League of Nations. Poli­
tical scientists such as Paul-André Rosental stress that through this, immi­
grants were granted social rights for the first time.81 But again, the very legal
form of these rights can be – and has been82 – seen as an effort to restore
aspects of human dignity and moral economy that had been lost (if not sys­
tematically destroyed) in modernity. And again, these benefits came with a
price, as the contracts restricted the autonomy of any migrants who used the
provided channels, hampered self-organized migration and subsistence, and
delivered the very composition of the groups allowed to migrate to state
intervention, as migrants eligible for work abroad were screened by both
sending and receiving countries. And, as the terms of migration were largely
determined by the receiving countries, the juridification solidified power
inequalities between the European nations.83 It did not exclude more

80 See Catherine Collomp, ‘Labour Unions and the Nationalization of Immigration

Restriction in the United States, 1880–1924’, in Fahrmeir, Faron, and Weil,
Migration Control, 237–252; Patrick Weil, ‘Races at the Gate: Racial Distinctions
in Immigration Policy: A Comparison between France and the United States’, in
Fahrmeir, Faron, and Weil, Migration Control, 271–297.
81 Paul André Rosental, ‘Migrations, souveraineté, droits sociaux Protéger et expul­
ser les étrangers en Europe du XIX e siècle à nos jours’, in Annales. Histoire,
Sciences Sociales 2, 66 (April–June 2011), 335–373, 351–353.
82 Cf. some of the citations in Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New
York: W.W. Norton, 2007), 17–19.
83 Christoph Rass, Institutionalisierungsprozesse auf einem internationalen Arbeitsmarkt.
Bilaterale Wanderungsverträge in Europa zwischen 1919 und 1974 (Paderborn,
Germany: Schöningh, 2010), 309–311, 353–383; Janine Ponty, Polonais méconnus.
Histoire des travailleurs immigrés en France dans l’entre-deux-guerres (Paris: Pub­
lications de la Sorbonne), 60.
30 Michael G. Esch
autonomous and self-administered forms of migration, but it complicated
them. It was also the ILO – together with migrant organizations such as the
Zemgor – that played a crucial role in transforming the stateless Russian
refugees into migrants: from 1926 onwards, it distributed many Russians who
had not already found work in Berlin, Brussels, or Paris among countries on
the other side of the Atlantic that were interested in receiving them for work
or for agricultural settlement.84
The admission of the ‘White Russians’ as precariously privileged refugees
was thus an amalgam of (mostly Christian) humanitarian concern, political
positioning, and the sheer (practical and normative) power of the facts, as
more than one million refugees were already there and had to be dealt with.
The significance of ideological opposition diminished after the recognition of
the Bolshevist government – on both sides. Soviet Russia lost interest in any
return migration. But as the conflict of systems prevailed (as well as a claim
made by the diaspora to represent a better, truer Russia, which was at least
symbolic), this désintéressement did nothing to change the unambiguous
image of the White Russian refugee in the West, and most particularly in
Paris: the idealtypus was the humble but educated taxi driver who turned out
to be a prince.85 More generally, the exiled Russian was a pious conservative,
nostalgic of tsarism, humble, and hardworking – and, of course, never on
strike. This image as an extension of the humble and grateful victim mixed
with a certain amount of oriental exoticism and an ascribed extraordinary
talent for ballet was not only produced by the media,86 but was also nourished
by some public actors and writers, who propagated the myth of the depth of
the ‘Russian or Slavic soul’.87 This narrative prevails even in the pertinent lit­
erature on Russian refugees in the interwar period,88 but it is actually far from
the truth: among the Russian exiles were numerous social revolutionaries and
anarchists, for example Nestor Machno and Volin (Vsevolod Ejchenbaum),

84 Long, ‘Early Repatriation Policy’, 151; Catherine Gousseff, ‘Le placement des
réfugiés russes dans l’agriculture. L’état français et le zemgor dans l’action inter­
nationale’, in Cahiers du monde russe 46, 4 (2005): 757–776.
85 As in the popular novel by Max du Veuzit (Alphonsine Simonet), John, chauffeur
russe (Paris: Tallandier, 1931).
86 Roland Huesca, Triomphes et scandales: La Belle Epoque des ballets russes (Paris:
Hermann, 2001).
87 See Marina Cvetaeva, A Captive Spirit (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1980); Nina Berberova,
Billancourt Tales (New York: New Directions, 2009).
88 Gousseff, Immigrés russes en France; Hélène Menegaldo, Les Russes à Paris, 1919–
1939 (Paris: Autrement, 2003); Robert H. Johnston, New Mecca, New Babylon: Paris
and the Russian Exiles, 1920–1945 (Montreal, QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press,
1988); Karl Schlögel (ed.), Der große Exodus. Die russische Emigration und ihre
Zentren 1917 bis 1941 (Munich, Germany: C.H. Beck, 1994). A notable exception,
typically by a historian who did not specialize in Russian refugees, but in Russian
anarchism before and after 1917, is Dittmar Dahlmann, ‘Russische Anarchisten im
deutschen Exil 1919–1925’, in Karl Schlögel (ed.), Russische Emigration in Deutsch­
land 1918 bis 1941. Leben im europäischen Bürgerkrieg (Berlin: Berlin Akademie
Verlag, 1995), 251–260.
 Refugees and migrants: 1789–1938 31
who had no part in other exiles’ transfigurations of tsarism. And there are
indications that, similar to other migrants, Russian workers gradually engaged
in socialist workers’ organizations or eventually became ardent communists.89
Even in Paris, the cradle of the hardworking, noble Russian, they eventually
participated in strikes – which even then did not change their public repre­
sentation. When, during the Renault strike in 1926, Vassilij Podčasov was
threatened with expulsion after his speech at a strike rally, L’Humanité noted
him as Ukrainian, although he had even served in the Vrangel army against the
Soviets and was thus an archetypal Russian refugee.90 Another informative case
was Marc Chagall: when the painter and his family visited France and Spain to
attend expositions of his works, he did so with the backing and financing of the
Soviet government, but Chagall transformed into a Russian refugee when he
found a better working environment in the West.91
Overall, the integration of the Russians – and generally of all the other
displaced persons of the early interwar period – proved a success chiefly
because the thriving global economy of the 1920s needed a workforce. When
the next great wave of – again Jewish – refugees arrived in the 1930s, this time
out of the internationally acknowledged Nazi Germany, the global economic
crisis and national protectionism schemes had changed attitudes from chari­
table benevolence to a certain hostility that was often additionally charged
with anti-Semitism.92 Their arrival was also an occasion to redefine the status
of alien immigrants altogether, at least in France and the United States.93
When the international community negotiated the distribution of the Jewish
refugees in Évian in 1938, only two countries – Columbia and the Dominican
Republic – committed themselves to accepting a noteworthy number of them.

Asylum, migrants, and politics: some concluding remarks

Overall, the legal or moral status of the refugee has always been ambiguous.
It offers moral and/or legal support and privileges while it also imposes
numerous expectations concerning qualities and behaviour that more or less

89 Cf. the contributions by André Liebich, Hartmut Rüdiger Peter, and Dittmar
Dahlmann in Karl Schlögel (ed.), Russische Emigration in Deutschland. Leben im
europäischen Bürgerkrieg (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1995), 229–242; 243–250;
251–260. The website kalinka-machja offers a photograph of a group of Russian
communists in Corsica in the late 1920s: http://www.kalinka-machja.com/photo/a
rt/default/7672261-11862465.jpg?v=1428909506 (accessed 12 January 2017).
90 Esch, Parallele Gesellschaften, 424–425. On the communists’ approach to the
refugees, see Ralph Schor, ‘Les Russes blancs devant l’opinion française (1919–
1939)’, in Cahiers de la Méditerranée 48, 1 (1994): 211–224.
91 See Michael G. Esch, ‘Der Pass der Bella Chagall’, in Mitropa (2012): 55–56.
92 Cf. the seminal work by Michael R. Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in
the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
93 See Anne Klein, ‘Asile, antisémitisme, solidarité: la construction de l’étranger dans
les relations franco-allemandes dans les années 1930 et 1940’, in Hommes et
migrations 1277 (2009): 48–54; Marrus, The Unwanted.
32 Michael G. Esch
openly contradict the refugee’s subjectivity and reality. But this tension
between subjectivity and social reality on the one hand and administrative
and discursive categories on the other is so ubiquitous in migration politics,
and in the modern exercise of power in general, that it does not explain the
impossibility of constructing universal asylum and refugee rights in a context
of state sovereignty. In hindsight, we see numerous indications that the concept
of a right to asylum had a couple systemic flaws right from the start. These
flaws go beyond common criticism that ‘debates about the development of
asylum regimes and asylum practices were mostly far from the reality of flight
and expulsion’ and that they were solely guided by security and economic
concerns.94 First and foremost, however, asylum was always a political concept.
The way in which categories of migrants that should be accepted as refugees
were constructed defined crucial parameters for the way the nation state
constructed, viewed and represented itself politically, ideologically, and morally.
In effect, the granting of asylum becomes a legitimatory necessity, particularly
when sufficiently relevant peer groups succeed in claiming that the welcoming
of a particular migrant/refugee group is consistent with the proclaimed values
and propagated socioeconomic system. Obviously, this aspect gained momen­
tum during the Cold War on both sides of the ‘Iron Curtain’ (a period that the
author is addressing in an ongoing project). It was also a thorn in the side for
the very same state agencies, as it was anachronistically embedded within an
ethical system whose transcendental foundations the enlightened republic had
wanted to destroy once and for all but, time and again, was referred to in
public discourse. Asylum regimes often hamper the states’ claims to control
and regulate migration especially when it comes to expulsion. It is thus not
really a paradox that the very institution that has so many problems in dealing
with refugees is also the institution that produces them in the first place. The
ambiguity between the republican concept of national sovereignty derived from
the collective of citizens, but embodied in the state, and a universality of rights
that stems directly from monotheism obviously remains active. In 1993, the one
right to asylum so unconditional that it actually put noticeable limits to state
dispositions, i.e. the asylum clause in the West German Grundgesetz (which had
been mirrored by a non-expulsion clause, similar to that of 1793, in the
German Democratic Republic), was abolished in favour of a normal, modern
mixed-migration regime.

94 Jochen Oltmer, ‘Flucht, Vertreibung und Asyl im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert’, in
IMIS-Beiträge 20 (2002): 107–134, at pp. 133–134.
2 Return migration and social disruption
in the Polish Second Republic
A reassessment of resettlement regimes
Keely Stauter-Halsted

In the spring of 1919, as Poland’s long-awaited independence dawned, an

estimated two million return migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers made their
way across Europe’s war-torn landscape towards sovereign Polish territory.
Along the country’s still unsettled eastern frontier, civilians who had evacuated
to the Russian interior crammed understaffed border stations. Ukrainian
speakers and Jews displaced by shifting boundaries and bloody pogroms plea­
ded for a safe haven, while ‘White Russians’ turned to the newly established
mechanism of political asylum. To the west, Silesians crossed the frontier from
Bohemia and Germany, and Slovak highlanders scaled mountain passages to
reunite with families in the Polish Carpathians. Even residents of the port city
of Gdańsk in northern Poland, now under League of Nations jurisdiction,
moved south to protect their Polish citizenship. Meanwhile, hundreds of thou­
sands of demobilized troops, Poles who had fought in the armies of three
empires and Russian prisoners of war (POWs) liberated from camps inside
Germany, began the journey back to their pre-war homes. Everywhere shifting
borders and political jurisdictions meant that wives no longer held the pass­
ports of their husbands, children of their parents, and workers were barred from
employment at now-foreign factories.1
hat was almost overlooked in the new state’s efforts to accommodate the
influx of migrants along its land borders were the thousands of labourers who
boarded transatlantic steamers in the United States to journey ‘home’ to an
independent Poland they had never known. Disembarking in Gdańsk or other
northern ports, these ‘re-emigrants’ came back to a country much changed by
the vagaries of war. Many had been trapped in the US by the outbreak of

1 For general patterns of return and refugee flow, see Bruno Cabanes, The Great War
and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918–1924 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2014), 133–164; Nick Baron and Peter Gatrell (eds), ‘Introduction’, Home­
lands: War, Population and Statehood in Eastern Europe and Russia, 1918–1924
(London: Wimbledon Publishing, 2004), 1–6; Michael R. Marrus, The Unwanted:
European Refugees from the First World War through the Cold War (Philadelphia,
PA: Temple University Press, 1985, 2002); Eugene M. Kulischer, Europe on the
Move: War and Population Changes, 1917–1947 (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1948), 121–126.
34 Keely Stauter-Halsted
hostilities. Others were self-proclaimed ‘exiles’ who had fled a Poland still occu­
pied by foreign powers and hoped to contribute their muscle and know-how to
rebuilding the independent state. These returning Amerykanie have appeared in
the historical record as a disgruntled group of misfits, disappointed with their
reception, frustrated by spiralling real estate prices and land shortages, and sty­
mied by a recalcitrant bureaucracy. Historians have assessed the post-war surge
of American repatriates in terms of their burden to the new state, the pressures
they placed on government services, and the cultural conflicts they spawned
within local communities. Many were so disappointed by their reception that
they quickly embarked on new excursions abroad in search of employment.2
This chapter reassesses the impact of American repatriates in the context of the
broader crisis of human mobility along Poland’s frontiers during the post-war
moment. In many respects, I argue, American repatriates can be understood as part
of a wave of population displacement plaguing the new state as it struggled to
process, feed, and find work for hundreds of thousands of uprooted people. Though
many Polish Americans returned with savings, their distinctive experiences abroad
and the lack of shared memory of war set them apart from their countrymen and
made them the focus of suspicion and hostility. Nonetheless, over time, American
returnees and other repatriates became part of an important transformation within
Polish society, facilitating what might be called ‘productive forms of social disrup­
tion’. Like refugees and asylum seekers everywhere, they introduced new ideas and
new ways of doing things. Their physical mobility contributed to the redistribution
of agricultural land and urban property among new social classes. Their
enthusiasm for politics and for reading newspapers engaged a whole generation
of peasants in civic activism. The patterns of thought they learned while abroad
led them to challenge traditional authority, especially the strength of the Church
hierarchy, the status of local notables, and the power of civil administrators.
These modernizing impulses, I argue, assisted lower-class Poles navigating the
shift from imperial subject to full citizens of a democratic state.
States have long been suspicious of people who are on the move. From
vagrants to gypsies, nomads to refugees, established governments have routi­
nely sought to settle or exclude transient populations.3 In the aftermath of the

2 Adam Walaszek, Reemigracja ze Stanów Zjednoczonych do Polski po I Wojnie

´
Swiatowej (1919–1924) [Re-emigration from the United States to Poland after the
First World War (1919–1924)] (Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1983);
Mark Wyman, Round Trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880–
1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Krystyna Duda-Dziewierz, Wieś
Małopolska a emigracja amerykańska: studium wsi Babica powiatu rzeszowskiego
[A Village in Southern Poland and American Emigration: A Study of Babica in the
Rzeszów District] (Warsaw: Poznań, 1938).
3 On the attitude of established states towards itinerant people, see Reece Jones, Violent
Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move (London: Verso, 2016); James C. Scott, See
Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Condition Have Failed (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, The
Essential Foucault: Selections from Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, edited
by Paul Rabinow and Nikolas S. Rose (New York: The New Press, 2003), 229–245.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 It was luncheon-time, and the men had halted in their work to
discuss the contents of the baskets that had been sent up from the
farms. Owd Zub helped himself to another piece of cold apple pie
before answering.
‘It’s a gooid dog nah,’ he said presently, speaking with
deliberation, ‘if t’ lad doesn’t get it ower fond.’
‘Ower fond?’ It was Nance the woman who spoke. She had
brought up her father’s luncheon and was sitting near at hand. There
was a sparkle in her eye, and her resolute little chin was thrust forth
aggressively. ‘Ower fond,’ she repeated, scornfully. ‘Some o’ yo think
us younger end can’t do owt reight. Why, Zubdil’s trained that dog
reight, an’ all. It’s good enough for t’ trials.’
The men laughed good-humouredly. The girl’s relations with Zubdil
were now well established and recognised, and her quick
intervention was to be expected. But good enough for the trials—
well, working it on the moors was one thing, but to direct an
inexperienced dog on an enclosed field under the eyes of a crowd,
and in competition with some of the best and most experienced trial
working animals, was another matter altogether. They laughed at the
girl’s warmth, and let it go at that. But young Zub, happening to walk
past at the time while counting up the sheep, heard the words. They
quickened him and gave birth to the idea, while Long Abram’s
praise, which, if brief, went a long way, emboldened him. He thought
deeply, but kept his counsel; not even to Nance did he open his mind
for some time. But he worked the young dog even more regularly
and watched her keenly. Then one day he wrote a letter, and the girl,
face flushed, looked on.
A few weeks later the two, with Owd Zub, were units in the crowd
that had gathered in a large field in a village some miles higher up
the dale. It was the dale’s annual agricultural show and gala day, and
all the farming community that could toddle, walk, or ride, to say
nothing of visitors, had converged upon the spacious pasture. On the
back of the right hand of each and all of them was an impression in
purple ink; it was the pass-out check, imprinted upon each one with
a rubber date stamp by a stalwart, red-faced policeman, who stood
guard at the gate. They have little use for gloves, these folk of the
Craven dales.
The three, with l’ile Nance stretched at ease at their feet, stood
somewhat apart from the crowd. Owd Zub was uneasy and a trifle
wrathful, and also, having already paid several visits to the
refreshment booth, inclined to be querulous. Not until that morning,
as they were packing into the farm gig, had he learned that l’ile
Nance had been entered for the sheep-dog trials. For years these
trials had been the feature of the show, and they attracted good
dogs, and knowing this, and being convinced that the little dog would
not shine against such opponents, he was sore. Deep down in his
heart he was proud of his son, and he did not relish seeing him
beaten before his fellows of the dale.
‘What chance hes shoo?’ he growled. ‘Theer’s lots o’ first-class
dogs here. There’s Tim Feather wi’ his, ’at’s run i’ theease trials for t’
past six year. An’ theer’s Ike Thorpe, thro’t’ Lancashire side. He’s
ta’en t’ first prize here this last two year. He’s owd hand at t’ game,
an’ soa is his dog.’
‘Well,’ said his son, ‘if he wins it ageean he can hev it.’
He spoke somewhat abstractedly. The trials had already begun,
and he was more intent on watching his rivals and in familiarising
himself with the course than in listening to the elder man. It was a
long field and of good breadth, so that there was plenty of room for
the sheep to run. Along the farther side, close to the bank of the
river, were three sets of upright posts, like goal-posts, but lacking the
net and cross-bar. Through these the sheep had to be driven, and
whilst this was being done the owner of the dog had to stay near the
judges; he was, in fact, looped to a rope attached to a stake to
prevent him, in his eagerness, going to the assistance of his animal.
As a consequence, all his commands had to be given in whistles or
by word of mouth. Near the head of the enclosure was the second
set of obstacles—a cross-road made of hurdles. The sheep had to
be piloted through each road and then driven to a little hurdle
enclosure and penned there. The competing owners were allowed to
drop their rope and go to the help of their dogs at the cross-roads
and the pen, and the winning dog was the one that penned the
sheep in the shortest time with the fewest mistakes.
Young Zub was the last to compete, and so far the best
performance had been done by Ike’s dog, which had penned its
three allotted sheep in fine style in nine-and-a-half minutes. As the
young farmer looped the rope about his arm he took stock of his
three sheep, held by as many perspiring attendants at the far end of
the enclosure. They were fresh from the moors that morning, and
their fear and wildness were manifest. Zubdil saw that there would
be trouble if once they broke away, but he was cool and unflurried as
he nodded to the time-keeper to indicate that he was ready.
‘Time,’ said that official, and dropped a white handkerchief. It was
the signal for the men to let go the sheep, which, once released, ran
a little way, and then began to nibble the rich luscious grass. It was
grand fare for them after what the moors had provided. At the same
instant Zubdil waved his stick. As if galvanised into life, Nance, who
had been stretched lazily at his feet snapping at the flies, shot up the
field like an arrow from a bow. Young Zub, straining hard at the rope,
his fingers in his mouth, watched her every stride, judging both pace
and distance. A moment later a shrill whistle, a long-drawn-out rising
cadence, went up, and with one ear cocked by way of reply the
young dog closed in on the rear of the nibbling sheep. They threw up
their heads and broke towards the river in a swift rush. A series of
sharp notes stabbed the air, and l’ile Nance, belly flat almost, such
was her speed, swung round them and headed them off. Back they
came in a huddled group to the very mouth of the first lot of posts.
For a second they hesitated, uncertain where to run, but Nance was
coming up on their rear and they broke through. Hard on their heels
she followed, swinging now right, now left, as one or other made as if
to burst away, and so skilful her piloting that she took them straight
away through the second line of posts at the run. A loud cheer went
up from the onlookers; it was a neat bit of work. But not a man but
knew that things were going too well; it is not in the nature of driven
sheep to keep the proper course for long together.
True to their traditions of stupidity and contrariness, they broke
away fan-wise when nearing the last posts. Zubdil, straining on loop
until he was drawn sideways, sent out clear, quick calls, a Morse
code of commands. Nance was as if making circles on her two near
legs. With ears laid flush, body stretching and closing like a rubber
cord, she flashed round the heads of the straying ones, collected
them and hustled them through the posts at panic speed. Once
again that rising note rang out, and in response she swept them
round in a wide circle towards the cross-roads. This was the danger
point, for the hurdles stood close to the ring of spectators, and here,
if anywhere, the sheep were most likely to bolt out of hand.
What happened was the unexpected. A fussy fox-terrier, excited
by the tumult and its nerves snapping at the sight of the racing
sheep, broke loose from its owner and, open-mouthed and noisy,
sprang in to take a hand. It caught the nearest sheep and nipped its
leg. A roar of anger went up; an interruption like this was against all
tradition. Young Zub, who was racing across the field to join l’ile
Nance, rapped out an excusable ‘damn,’ and half a dozen farmers
on the edge of the ring loudly expressed a wish to break the neck of
the terrier, and to ‘belt’ the careless owner of that animal. On the
slope above the crowd Owd Zub was dancing with rage.
‘They done it a’ purpose,’ he roared, his voice booming above the
din. ‘Sumbody’s done it a’ purpose. They knawed t’ l’ile dog ’ud win.
We’ll hev another trial. We’ll tak all t’ dogs i’ England an’ back wer
own for a ten-pun noat. We’ll hev another trial.’
In deep wrath he was making his way to the enclosure, one hand
fumbling meanwhile to get into the pocket where lay his old-
fashioned purse, securely tied and buttoned up, when a hand
gripped him firmly. Another, equally decided in its action, closed over
his mouth.
‘Ho’d thi din,’ cried Nance, for it was she. ‘It’s all reight. Sitha, look
at t’ l’ile dog nah. Well done, Zubdil.’
It was all over in a moment, but it was a stirring moment. L’ile
Nance had dealt with the intruder. Taking it in her stride, she had
seized the terrier by the back of the neck, flung it from her with a toss
of her head, and was about her business. She and her master had to
deal with a serious situation, for one sheep, in mad panic at the
terrier’s attack and at the feel of its teeth in her leg, had bolted
blindly through the crowd, clearing the fence in one fine leap. A
silver-and-grey streak flew through the opening thus made, and in a
second both dog and sheep were swallowed up among the
onlookers. Zub, down on his knees the better to see through the legs
of the huddled spectators, was whistling until he was well-nigh black
in the face, but he never lost his head. His calls were wonderful,
articulate almost. They were thrilling, short, but infinitely encouraging
and coaxing. Many a man would have deeply cursed his dog; every
ounce of Zubdil went into encouraging the little animal. ‘Over, over,
over,’ said the whistles, as plainly as could be, and at the moment
that the other Nance on the slope had stayed the wrathful old farmer,
her four-footed namesake came back over the fence in the rear of
the missing sheep.
The prodigal, bearing down upon its fellows, who had stopped to
graze the moment they found they were not being harried, alarmed
them, and they fled. By good luck they bore down straight upon the
cross-road hurdles. With Zubdil on one flank, l’ile Nance on the
other, there was no escape, and they bolted straight through. All the
precious seconds lost by the incident of the fox-terrier were thus won
back, with more to them. Nance awaited the panting fleeces at the
exit, and with her tongue lolling, and her bright eyes just visible
through the tangled fringe of hair, she appeared to be grinning them
a welcome. The sheep spun round to avoid her, and were brought up
opposite the second entrance by the long form of the young farmer.
His arms were swaying, gently, unhurriedly, waving them into the
entrance. There was need now of patience and tact, for seconds
were becoming precious, and an over-alarmed sheep is a—mule. He
whistled softly with pursed lips while yet they hesitated what to do.
Nance sank prone.
Save that there was a dark patch against the green of the grass,
she had disappeared. Without any visible movement the patch drew
nearer the hesitating sheep. It was pretty work, and the crowd
marked their admiration by their dead silence. The sheep sighted the
dog, backed round to face her, and crowded with their hind-quarters
against the hurdle. Zubdil was silent, motionless, save for the slow
movement of his arms. Nance slid a little nearer, nearer yet. The
sheep crowded further back against the opening. She was not now a
yard away. Suddenly she sat up and panted hard. One of the
animals, turning sharply to escape, found an opening, pushed along
it in dread haste. The other two struggled for next place, and the
cross-roads were won.
Again was l’ile Nance there to meet them as they gained the open,
and collecting them smartly she raced them off towards the pen.
They broke away, but their wild rush ended in their being brought up
exactly against the opening of the pen. Zubdil was there, too, his
arms going like the sails of a windmill on an almost breezeless day.
They pushed past the opening, and Nance rose up out of the grass
to greet them. They spun about and raced off, but in a trice she was
doing trick running about their heads and flanks, and when they
stopped for breath the mouth of the pen was again before them.
Zubdil drew a cautious step nearer, arms outspread, his lips
puckered. Just wide of him a pair of ears pricked up above the grass.
There was a moment’s hesitation; one of the sheep poked its head
through the mouth of the pen. Nance glided a little nearer, and the
other two animals crowded against the first. Another step into the
pen; the dog was only a yard away. There was a flurried movement
about the opening. L’ile Nance sat up and lolled out a red tongue.
She appeared to be laughing. There was a crush, a scramble, the
sheep burst in, and Nance slid across the opening, lay down, and
fixed her pearly eyes on her master. What wonder if she appeared to
be grinning cheerfully?
Before the cheering had subsided, a stolid-faced judge stepped
towards Zubdil. The pink rosette which denoted the first prize was in
his hand, and at the sight of it there was more cheering. The other
Nance on the slope clutched the arm of Owd Zub. For his part he
was smiling broadly, and ecstatically slapping his leggings hard with
his ash stick.
‘Nine-an’-a-quarter minutes,’ said the judge, handing the rosette to
the young farmer. ‘By gum, but it wor a near do. Shoo’s a rare ’un,
that dog o’ thine, an’ nobbut a young ’un, too.’
 But Zubdil’s greatest reward came later. It was not the hearty
congratulations of so doughty an opponent as Ike, nor the incoherent
remarks of Owd Zub. It was when an arm slid through his, when
eyes dimmed with the moisture of genuine pride looked into his, and
a low voice said:
‘I’se reight glad, lad. I is.’
He laughed, gladly. Then openly, unashamed, he stooped and
took toll of her lips. Nor was he denied. And the other Nance, looking
up from where she lay at their feet, tossed back a lock of hair and
wagged her tail in approval.
 FRAGMENTS FROM GERMAN EAST.
by a soldier’s wife.
A still lagoon of veld, mile upon mile. Nowhere in the world, I
should suppose, does the tide of battle ebb and flow so almost
imperceptibly. Sometimes, only in echo, we hear the thunder of the
overwhelming seas—sometimes, just now and then, the ripple at our
feet breaks in a little cloud of spray and for a moment dims the eyes
that are used to vast spaces, with sudden yearning for an island
home beneath the far horizon, and perhaps hands tremble a little in
tearing the wrapper from the daily newspaper.
But enough for us, so far, has been our all unequal struggle with
Nature, who turns our skies to steel and with fierce winds scatters
the hovering clouds, while the young crops shrivel and the
watersprings are dry and the eyes of the beasts wait upon us who
can give them no meat in due season.
A Kaffir boy comes round one evening and sings a doggerel he
has fashioned from an old nigger melody, and others join in the
foolish refrain:

‘I come to Basutoland,
I come through lands and sea,
I kill five thousand Germans,
With my banjo on my knee.’

We laugh and throw him a tickey, and turn again to watch the skies—
to-morrow, perhaps, the rains will come and we can plough and sow.
For the dread hand that writes upon the wall has formed no fearful
word for us—as yet—and sympathy, deep and very real as it is,
stands in our lexicon as ‘a feeling for’ rather than ‘a feeling with.’
And then a cable calls me in haste to Durban to meet a returning
transport and suddenly there is nothing in the world but war and its
magnificence and its horror. The clusters of people at various
stations who come to meet the mail train—the event of the day—the
youths who slouch up and down the platform with loud voices and
noisy jests, the girls who laugh with them, the groups of farmers
talking of the crops—all these rouse me to a feeling of irritation, then
to an impotent anger.
‘Come with me,’ I want to urge, ‘and I will take you where men are
heroes in life and death.’ And again, ‘Is it nothing to you that your
brothers agonise? Will you jest while the earth opens under your
feet?’—and something ominous creeps into the meaningless
laughter.
And then at last comes Durban, and I am surrounded with war
activities and what was sinister has vanished in the wholesomeness
of sacrifice and strenuous work.
To hundreds here war work has become their daily life. The town
is always full of soldiers—Australians, New Zealanders, South
Africans—coming and going. Here is a company of New Zealanders
winding up the street. From a balcony I watch them marching with a
fine swing—well set-up, stalwart fellows. Someone comes with a tray
of cigarettes and we throw packets down amongst them, and their
upturned, laughing boyish faces ask for more. Youngsters all of
these, eager for happiness, eager for a slap at the Germans, and to
‘see life’—and their destination is the battlefield of Flanders! At the
corner they dismiss and there is a race for the rickshaws; three
crowd into one, and the Zulu boy gladly sweats up the incline and
capers and leaps when the downward slope relieves him, knowing
that for his brief exertion he will ask and get six times his lawful fee.
His ostrich feathers wave, his black limbs flash, and the passengers
lean back and laugh.
And the other side of the picture—a shipload of returning
Australians, on crutches, arms in slings, helpless on wheeled chairs,
with the look of the trenches on the brave faces that smile their
grateful thanks. For to each and all Durban has a warm welcome.
While they still lie off the Point, a girl signaller bids them come to the
Y.M.C.A. Hut for all that they want, ladies from the Patriotic League
wait on the wharf with supplies of cigarettes and fruit, motor-cars and
carriages stop to pick up stragglers and carry them home to dinner,
to a concert or theatre, and the Hut itself tempts with open doors to
the comforts within, to the tables strewn with magazines and papers,
to the letter-writing facilities and varied games, to the most excellent
meals, where one penny will give a hungry man a liberal helping of
cold meat or an appetising plate of fish mayonnaise, while a second
penny provides the steaming cup.
Down on the Point a little crowd has gathered. The steamer is a
day late, and wives and mothers sit and wait, or restlessly ply any
and all with endless reiterate questions, or hold impatiently to a
telephone receiver. And the night falls, and along the beach gardens
the coloured lights hang in jewelled strings against the dark. A
drizzle of rain makes a halo of their blurred radiance, the band plays,
the few wanderers—the last of the holiday-makers—talk of their
homeward journey, for the summer and the beginning of the season
of rains are with us. Far out in the bay a mast-head light springs up,
then more lights, a stir of excitement in the gathering crowd at the
Point, and slowly the tug leads the transport to her moorings.
‘Stand back—stand back! Make way there!’ and with a whir of
starting engines, the motor ambulances steer their way through the
pressing crowd, and slowly the stretcher-bearers carry their freight
along the lower deck and round the difficult angle of the lowered
gangway. In silence this, and the greetings are very quiet as the
waiting women meet their loved ones again—for this great steamer
with her rows of decks and wide accommodation holds but the
remnant of a regiment. Fifteen hundred strong they marched through
Durban nine months ago, and how many have not returned! Fever,
dysentery, debility, starvation, wounds and death—these have all
taken their toll.
I suppose there are few parts of the world which nature has made
more difficult to the intruder than German East Africa. In the forest
the thorny creepers join tree to tree in close high walls until the very
stars—man’s only guide—are hidden, nearly all the trees also are a-
bristle with protecting spears, sharp as needles to pierce and tear
the flesh, and to leave behind, it may be, a poisoned festering sore.
Mountain ranges throw their boulders and tear their gaping chasms
in the way, the streams, too few and far between for thirsty man, are
torrents to be crossed on fallen logs, on slimy boulders where one
sees the sudden agony flash in the eyes of a laden mule that slips,
and with a struggle of frantic hoofs is tossed to death. A herd of
elephants crashes like thunder through the scrub, trumpeting their
suspicion of man’s presence, the lions prowling unheard startle with
a sudden hungry roar and seek their meat from God.
Then come the swamps where the crocodile lies in the slime, and
snakes coil, and the mosquito goes about its deadly work. Men sink
to their waists in mud, the transports break down—all are tried in
vain, ox waggons, mule carts, motor-cars, ‘and then we go hungry,’
said one man to me. Gaunt and weak, with eyes too bright for health,
he smiled and spoke lightly—a least trembling of the hands, a twitch
of a muscle, a look behind the smiling eyes which no laugh could
quite conceal, these the only signs of the over-strained, still quivering
nerves. He told me the story of how the flour supply ran out, of how
the pangs of hunger were eased with the flesh of donkey or
rhinoceros. For eight days the hungry men waited and watched and
then a transport laden with sacks appeared—and the sacks held
newspapers!
Another spoke. ‘The worst thing that ever I went through was in
the ⸺ valley. Will you ever forget it, Mike? We were going into
action along one of those awful winding elephant tracks through
grass above our heads—sort of maze, and you don’t know where
you’ll find yourself next minute, perhaps back where you came from,
or perhaps in a clearing, looking into the muzzle of a machine gun—
can’t see a foot ahead. Suddenly the Boches opened fire, and at the
very same moment we were attacked by a swarm of bees. Sounds
funny, but I can tell you it wasn’t. There were millions of ’em, going
for us all they were worth. The horses and pack-mules went near
mad and there were we, blind and dazed, stumbling along trying to
keep the brutes from our faces and the enemy’s fire dropping
around. Pretty sights we were when they’d finished with us—my two
eyes were bunged up so I’d just a slit to see through, and hands so
stiff and swollen I could scarce bend my fingers.’
 ‘My worst day,’ and another took up the tale, ‘was just when we
were at our worst off for food—fair starved we were, and just at
daybreak a family of rhinos came charging through our camp—Pa
and Ma and a lot of rum little coves scooting after them. Well, thinks
I, a slice of Pa would come in very handy grilled, so off I treks with
two or three chaps after me, and there, far below the rise, was a vlei
and a whole lot of rhinos standing round. Worse luck, as we got
down, we found it just chock-a-block with crocodiles. You hardly see
them at first, but just look close and you see a mud-bank sort of
heave and here and there you’ll get the glimpse of a great wide jaw,
the colour of the mud and as still, never moving an inch, but with
eyes watching the rhinos all the time. I tell you we didn’t go any too
close, but we were mortal hungry, so we tried to edge round to the
rhinos, keeping well clear of the mud and slime. One huge awkward-
looking brute was a bit away from the others and the swamp, so we
let fly and brought him down, staggering and falling not very far from
us—but by God, if these crocs hadn’t ripped out and got him before
we had a show, and so we didn’t get dinner that day. As nasty brutes
as you’d care to see, those crocs. A chap of ours shot one of ’em
one day and cut it open, and inside he found an anklet ornament and
a ring. How’s that for an ugly story? At another camp a horse went
down to the river to drink all serene, no sign of another living thing—
when sudden up comes a grinning jaw, and like a flash of light, it
snaps on the poor beast’s nose and pulls him in, and there was an
end of him.’
In the more open country grows the giant grass, waving over a
man’s head, dense and resistant as sugar-cane, and once a source
of deathly peril. The regiment had dug itself in some 300 yards from
the enemy trenches, when the wind, blowing in their faces, brought
to the men a smell of burning, and with a sudden roar a sea of
flames came sweeping down upon them—the enemy had set fire to
the tall grass. There was not a second to spare. The men leaped up
and, weak and exhausted as they were, forced their failing strength
into clearing the ground and cutting a fire belt. It was done with the
speed of demons, for a fiercer demon was upon them; the men with
their tattered garments that would have flared up so easily, put half a
life into those few seconds.
 The heat of the fire was on their faces, blinding their eyes, the
flames reached out tongues towards their store of ammunition.
Under cover of the fire and smoke the enemy came out and attacked
heavily. Our men leaped back, turned the full strength of their fire on
the enemy through the blinding smoke, and suddenly, miraculously—
the wind changed! It is gratifying to know that in a few moments the
enemy survivors were hurried back to their trenches before the
flames, to find their grass shelters on fire, and under a withering
storm from every rifle, maxim, and gun a grim silence fell upon their
trenches.
And so Nature, whose gigantic forces have joined our enemy’s in
this war against us, for once played him false; but the Hun is always
quick to turn her help to his best advantage. He sees to it that every
post, detached house, village, kraal, &c., has the protection of a
‘boma’—a thick impenetrable fence made of thorn trees, with the
huge strong spikes thrust outwards and the smooth butts inside the
shelter, made of such height and depth as is necessary to resist the
onslaught of elephant and rhinoceros and the cunning of the lion. All
around a wide thorn carpet is spread to pierce the feet of the
intruder. Imagine such a ‘boma’ flanked by rifle and machine-gun fire
from deep trenches concealed by cover and by a ‘false boma’ in rear
which makes the boma line apparently continuous—and a frontal
attack by infantry becomes a hazardous undertaking.
‘Could not the artillery destroy them?’ I asked, and was told of the
difficulties of locating the trenches for this purpose and of the
unlimited supply of high-explosive shells that would be required. All
approaches to defended posts have lanes cut through the bush, and
these are so arranged in irregular shape that every open piece of
ground can be covered by machine-gun and cross rifle fire.
Of the hardships of the march, of the hunger and thirst—once a
battle was fought for two days before a drop of water could be
obtained—of the fever and exhaustion, I could guess from watching
the speakers, and from the men’s talk to each other I heard of the
skilfully posted machine guns alert for a fleeting glimpse of troops
grouped, perhaps, round a wounded man, of the snipers in the trees,
of the maxims fired from the backs of animals clothed in grass, of the
danger of horrors and mutilation should a wounded man fall into the
hands of the Askari. All of this I was told freely; but of the endurance,
the magnificent self-oblation, the comradeship and devotion, these
came to my ears only from those who had commanded troops and
who could barely speak of these things for a catch in the throat.
The actual warfare, the battles, the bayonet charges, the fervour
and courage of attack—these are described by newspaper
correspondents in cables and despatches; but of the more human
side—‘the soul of the war’—few tales reach the outside world. The
courage of endurance, the absence of one word of complaint from
men so weak, latterly, that five miles a day sometimes had to be the
limit of their march—who shall tell of these?
Hear one last story from an outsider.
‘That regiment of yours is very thick with its companion regiment,
the Nth,’ he said. ‘A chap who is in the Nth told me the one regiment
never loses a chance of doing the other a good turn. Once, he said,
the Nth were in the first firing line, only 150 yards from the enemy.
There had been no chance of getting water-bottles filled, and the
men’s tongues were swollen with thirst. The other chaps were
suffering a lot too, but what do you think they did? All the regiment,
officers and men, sent up every bottle that had a drain left in it to the
fellows of the Nth, and mind you this was done under continuous fire.
Pretty fine, wasn’t it?’
A bugle call, a whistle, and the short breathing space is past.
Faces lean over the bulwarks, pink and boyish beside the thin and
often haggard brown, hands are waved and with songs and cheers
the old regiment, reinforced with its recruits, sways slowly and
steams into the blue.
Were the whole history of the war ever to be written, were the
myriad glorious deeds ever to be chronicled, would the world itself
contain the books that should be written?
 COQ-D’OR: A LETTER TO A SOUL.
by r. c. t.
My dear Dick,—When you went out from the breastwork that
night, along the little muddy path, and whispered me a laughing au
revoir, I thought no more of it than of a hundred similar episodes that
made up day and night in these mad, half-romantic, unbelievable
times. There was nothing especial to make the incident memorable.
It was ten o’clock at night and the second relief for the sniper pits
had gone out half an hour or so. A frost had started after the
previous day’s cold rain, the water-filled crump holes had iced over
and the so-called paths through the wood were deceptively firm
looking, though in reality one’s feet and legs sank through the ice a
foot deep into that ghastly, sticky foot-trodden mud.
I knew your job—to visit the listening patrols and the snipers on
the edge of the wood—and I remember thinking that your habit of
going out alone without an orderly was foolish, near though the posts
might be to the breastworks. However, you were young—four and
twenty isn’t a great age, Dick—and I recalled your saying that you
would no more think of taking an orderly than of asking a policeman
to pilot you across Piccadilly Circus.
The wood was fairly quiet that night, though there were the usual
bursts of machine-gun fire, the stray ping of high rifle shots against
the branches of the trees, and the noisy barking of that fussy field
battery of ours which always seemed to want to turn night into day.
The light of the moon let me see you disappear into the shadows,
and I heard the scrunch of your feet as you picked between the tree
trunks a gingerly way. Then I went along the breastwork line, saw
that all was right, found Peter munching chocolate and reading a
month-old copy of The Horse-Breeders’ Gazette!—fellows read such
funny literature in war time—in his dug-out—and myself turned down
the corduroy path to the splinter-proof hut that you so excellently
named ‘The Château.’
Dennis and Pip had already turned in and had left me an
uncomfortably narrow space to lie down beside them, and they were
daintily snoring. Through the partition beyond I heard our company
servants doing the same, only with greater vigour in their snore. But
my bed was already prepared, the straw was only moderately dirty
and odorous, and after ridding my boots with a scraper of some
portion of the mud, I thrust my feet into the sand-bags, lay down,
coiled myself up comfy in my bag and blankets and went to sleep.
For ten minutes only. Then I suddenly awakened into full
consciousness and found myself sitting up staring into the darkness,
and the chinks of moonlight coming in below and at the sides of the
ill-fitting door. I was listening intently too, and I did not know why. The
wood was absolutely quiet at the moment, and Dennis, Pip, and the
servants had all settled off into their second sleep where snoring is
an intrusion.
I had not dreamt, or I had no recollection of any dream if I had. But
upon me was a curious ill-defined sensation of uneasiness. No, I am
wrong—uneasiness is not the word. The feeling was merely that
something had happened. I did not know where or how or to whom.
Now the one thing one ought not to be in war time is fidgety. It is a
bad habit and yet a habit into which it is very easy to drift. So with
this thought upon me I deliberately lay quietly down again and
attempted to renew the sleep from which I had so suddenly been
wakened. Of course I failed. Sleep had gone from me completely,
absolutely, and moreover there was a force—that indefinite word
best describes it—impelling me to be up and doing. Doing what
Heaven only knew! I struggled against the feeling for a minute or
two, then I definitely gave in to it. Fidgety or not, I was going out of
the hut.
Dennis wakened momentarily as I rose and untied the sand-bags
off my legs and made for the door. He muttered ‘What’s the matter?’
heard my ‘Nothing, go to sleep again,’ and did as he was told.
 The night was beautiful outside and I stood at the door of the hut
shivering a little with the cold, but thinking what a madness it was
that had turned this wonderful wood into a battlefield! The sound of a
rifle shot knocking off a twig of a tree three or four feet above me
recalled my thoughts. Mechanically I felt to see that I had my
revolver, and then with my trusty walking-stick in my hand I went up
to the front breastworks.
I went along them and found all correct—the sentries alert and at
their posts. They were in the third night of their spell in the trenches
and in the moonlight they gave one the impression of sandstone
statues, their khaki a mass of dried yellow clay. Then I peeped in at
Peter and found the youth still munching chocolate, and afterwards I
went along to your abode expecting to find you asleep, and found
instead that your tiny dug-out was untenanted.
The curious feeling that had wakened me from my sleep had
disappeared while I had been making my tour of the breastworks
and only now did it reappear. There was no especial reason why I
should have been anxious, for a score of things might have taken
you elsewhere, but I nevertheless found myself striding quickly back
to the little gap between No. 2 and 3 breastworks, the spot where I
had last seen you and where you had bidden me good-night. I
questioned the sentry. It happened to be Rippon, that quaint little
five-foot-three cockney, who, I honestly believe, really likes war and
chuckles because he is genuinely amused when a shell hits the
ground ten yards in rear and misses the trench itself. He had seen
nothing of you since we parted.
‘Mr. Belvoir,’ he said—and you know how he mutilates the
pronunciation of your name—‘never comes back the same way as
he goes out.’ He gave me the information with a trace of reproof in
his voice, as though I ought to have remembered better the principal
points of my own lectures on Outposts, which I had so often given
the company in peace time. I nodded, walked along to the other
sentries and questioned them. They had none of them seen you
return. They were all quite confident that you had not passed by
them.
 I returned to Rippon and stood behind him a moment or two. The
cold was increasing and he was stamping his feet on the plank of
wood beneath him, and humming to himself quietly. I did not want to
seem anxious, but I was. I could not understand what had become of
you, where you had gone. I took a pace or two towards Rippon and
spoke to him.
‘Things been quiet to-night?’ I said casually.
He started at the sound of my voice, for he had not heard my
approach.
‘Quieter than usual, sir,’ he answered. ‘There was a bit of a
haroosh on the left half an hour ago and the Gerboys opposite us
took it up for a minute or so, but they’ve quieted down since. Funny
creatures, them Gerboys,’ he ruminated—‘good fighters and yet
always getting the wind up. I remember at Ligny when we was doin’
what wasn’t too elegant a retirement, me and Vinsen was in a
farm’ouse....’
I stopped him hurriedly. When Rippon gets on to the subject of
Ligny his garrulity knows no bounds.
‘I’m going out ahead, Rippon,’ I said. ‘I’ll come back again this
way. Warn the next sentry that I shall be doing so. Give me an
orderly, too.’ Rippon looked at me curiously. Perhaps my tone was
not normal. Then he bent down and stirred a man snoring in the
breastwork beside him. The man stirred uneasily and then suddenly
jumped up and clutched at the rifle through the sling of which his
right arm was thrust.
‘What’s up?’ he murmured. Rippon smiled.
‘It ain’t no attack,’ he answered. ‘The Captain wants you as his
orderly.’
A minute later we had left the breastwork line and were out in front
in the wood, our feet breaking through the thin film of ice and sinking
over our ankles in the mud beneath. Belgian mud may not be any
different from other mud, but to my dying day I shall always imagine
it so. It clasps you as though it wants to pull and keep you down, as
though, with so many of your friends lying beneath it, you too should
be there. We tugged our feet out each step, treading on fallen
branches where we could. I tried to trace by footsteps the path you
had taken, but failed. I could not think of anything better to do than
go out to the sniping pits and question the men there to know if you
had visited them.
I turned to the left then and made for number one group, Bell, my
orderly, following a pace or two behind. A cloud came over the face
of the moon, the night became suddenly dark, and the next moment I
had stumbled and almost fallen over what I imagined for a second to
be a stray sand-bag.
It was not a sand-bag, God knows it was not! The moon
reappeared and I saw it was you, Dick, lying on your side, with your
legs outstretched. I bent down when I realised that it was a body,
turned you over on your back and with Bell’s assistance ripped open
your Burberry, your tunic and your vest. A bullet had gone straight
through your heart, there was a little spot of congealed blood on your
breast, and—you had died—well, as suddenly and as easily as you
deserved to do, Dick. On your face was a smile.
I am not good at analysing feelings and there is no purpose in
trying to analyse mine. Indeed, I cannot remember exactly what my
sensations were. I had no sorrow for you, as I have never had
sorrow for those killed in this war. I do not suppose two men have
ever been closer friends than you and I, yet I was not even sorry for
myself. I remember that I turned to Bell and said half angrily: ‘I told
him to take an orderly, I was always telling him to take an orderly!’
I heard Bell’s irrelevant reply, ‘Damn them Bosches, sir.’ (The men
in your platoon had an affection for you, Dick.) Then together we
raised you, your wet clothes frozen, your hair matted with mud, and
picking up your cap and rifle from the ground, carried you slowly
back to the breastwork line, and there wakened a couple of stretcher
bearers.
Oh! I’m sick of this war, Dick, dully, angrily sick of it. This world
can’t be anything, I know, otherwise fellows like you would be kept in
it. For a week or two the fighting is all right; it is amazing, and
wonderful and elemental. Then as month after month goes by, when
there is nothing in your brain but making your line stronger, when
you think in sand-bags and machine guns and barbed wire and
bombs, when the stray shot or the casual shell kills or lacerates
some sergeant or corporal whom you have had since his recruit days
in your company, given C.B. to, spoken to like a father,
recommended step by step for promotion and at length grown to
trust and rely on—then it begins to show its beastliness and you
loathe it with a prolonged and fervent intensity.
Down at the field dressing station half a mile away, the young
doctor did what he could to preserve the decencies of death. I stood
at the door of the little cottage and looked out into the night. I
remember that my thoughts flew back to the immediate days before
the war and to a night a little party of us spent at the Russian Opera
at Drury Lane, when we saw that wonderful conceit ‘Coq-d’Or.’ You,
your sister, I and that young Saxon friend of yours—and of your
sister’s too! We had dined at The Carlton and were ever so pleased
with life. We had chuckled delightedly at the mimic warfare on the
stage, the pompous King, the fallen heroes. Now the mimic warfare
had turned to reality and here you were—dead in a ruined Belgian
cottage.
I left after a quarter of an hour and returned to the wood, my
feelings numb, my brain a blank. The corduroy path seemed
interminably long. Sleep was not for me that night and the morning
would do to tell Peter, Dennis and Pip that you were killed.
Unaccompanied by any orderly this time, I went through the
breastwork line to the spot where we had found you. The impress of
your body was on the ground; your loaded revolver, which for some
reason or other you must have had in your hand, was lying a yard or
two away. I picked it up, examined it and noticed that a round had
been fired.
I wondered why. You must have aimed at somebody and that
somebody must have shot back at you, and the somebody must
have been close. You were not the sort of man to blaze off into the
blue. I leant against a tree and tried to think the matter out. Our
snipers were out on your left, so the shot could not have come from
that direction, and a hundred yards on the right was the machine-gun