A city of newcomers: Migration and solidarity in the former East Germany

Abstract

This article examines how urban temporalities have come to alternately foster and hinder migrants' incorporation into the larger social body. It draws on ethnographic and archival research conducted in Eisenhüttenstadt, Germany, and focuses on the so-called “migrant crisis” of 2015, which resonated with earlier migration histories in the region. When Eisenhüttenstadt was founded in 1950, nearly one-third of its residents were naturalized East German citizens. Yet under the socialist regime, any acknowledgment of their migration background was expressly forbidden and perceived as a threat to Eastern Bloc geopolitical alliances. Around 2015, however, this history reemerged, first at the local cultural history museum and later, in public discourse. This article attends to the shifting positionality of migration histories within the context of the former East Germany, which was perceived as European in a global context but post-socialist in a German context. In doing so, it reveals how tensions between individual and urban futurities influence solidarity, integration, and national belonging.