Abstract
The initial catalyst for Jan Plamper's Das Neue Wir. Warum Migration dazugehört (“The New Us: Why Migration Belongs”), published in English by Cambridge University Press in 2023 as We Are All Migrants, was the profound rightward shift in German public discourse triggered by the August 2010 publication of SPD's Thilo Sarrazin's polemic, Deutschland schafft sich ab (“Germany Abolishes Itself”). Sarrazin's book sold over 1.5 million copies, mainstreaming xenophobic rhetoric under the guise of demographic critique. Plamper seeks to counter this populist agitation by offering an alternative, de-emotionalised historical perspective that reframes migration not as an anomaly, but as a structural constant of German history. While the original German title emphasises a prospective communal identity, the English title adopts a retrospective, genealogical stance: if one traces lineages back sufficiently through time, virtually the entire contemporary population of Germany possesses a migratory background.
Plamper's primary contribution to the expanding field of migration history lies in his effort to synthesise the experiences of diverse mobile populations – often atomised in public discourse as either Aussiedler (ethnic German re-settlers) or Ausländer (foreign labour) – into a singular, integrated narrative. Crucially, the volume spans migration patterns across both the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic from 1945 to 1990. This dual-track approach serves as a structural highlight, facilitating much-needed comparisons between the migration regimes of Western democratic capitalism and state socialism.
Plamper opens his historical retrospective in the nineteenth century, tracing migration from German-speaking lands to North America and the Tsarist Empire. By following these early departures, Plamper vividly demonstrates that contemporary integration challenges – such as spatial segregation and the clustering of newcomers along lines of origin, language and religion – are structural constants of the migratory experience, albeit here featuring Germans as the marginalised outsiders. From this foundation, the book convincingly argues that migration is the historical norm, weaving an analytical thread from post-World War II expellees to West German guest workers, East German contract workers and late-twentieth-century asylum seekers.
Structurally, the book is divided into two parts, organised around the epochal thresholds of 1945 and 1989. The first part examines the immediate post-war era, deftly incorporating the mass expulsion of German-speaking minorities from Eastern and Southeastern Europe into the broader purview of migration studies rather than treating it as an isolated national tragedy. The second part covers the post-reunification era through the present day (1989–2023) across three thematic chapters: “Germans There, Russians Here,” “Jewish Germaniya,” and “Welcoming Culture.” These chapters illuminate overlooked contemporary cohorts, focusing on groups whose lived experiences are profoundly shaped by cultural, linguistic and religious plurality despite often slipping through conventional census categories. Furthermore, Plamper carefully untangles the legal and conceptual distinctions between labour migration and asylum, contextualising German legislative frameworks within the shifting landscape of European Union border policies. This section culminates in an assessment of the 2015 refugee humanitarian crisis, during which Chancellor Angela Merkel's administration opened Germany's borders in a moments-long convergence of moral commitment and legal obligation.
It is no simple task to counter highly flammable public debates with sober empirical evidence, and Plamper's intervention does not succeed uniformly. A contemporary historian, Plamper explicitly anchors his scholarly interest in his own family lineage; as he notes on page 41, his paternal grandparents were part of the German-speaking minority expelled from Kadaň (Kaadan, in the Czech Republic) in April 1945 – a displacement rooted in the aggressive, expansionist wartime politics of the Nazi regime. However, Plamper's decision to characterise these post-war expulsions as “the largest forced population transfer – and perhaps the greatest single movement of people – in human history” is historiographically problematic. 1 It remains unclear what analytical value is generated by such comparative magnitudes. To offer a brief global counterpoint, the violent Partition of India in 1947 displaced between 12 and 20 million individuals along religious lines within a matter of months, dwarfing the European figures.
While the book excels at providing an accessible overview of migration to both German states in the latter half of the twentieth century, its weaknesses lie in an over-reliance on culturalist paradigms and a tendency to occasionally mirror the ideological distortions of the very debates it seeks to rectify. While Plamper successfully identifies numerous structural parallels between disparate historical movements, the text lacks a rigorous comparative framework that delves deeply into the underlying socio-economic drivers of these similarities – a limitation reflective of German migration research more broadly.
Additionally, Plamper's brief excursion into the nineteenth century stands as one of the volume's weaker segments, which would have benefited significantly from engagement with a wider, more international body of comparative literature. Plamper is certainly not the first scholar to couple past and present mobility to demonstrate the historical embeddedness of modern migration; historical comparisons illustrating that integration is a multi-generational process have been articulated more robustly elsewhere, most notably in the acclaimed works of Leo Lucassen. 2
Ultimately, We Are All Migrants is a deeply committed volume that succeeds in centring the histories of marginalised individuals who built lives and homes within the two German states. At its core, this is a book about belonging. It advocates for a revised national architecture that actively embraces these diverse trajectories into the central historical consciousness rather than relegating them to the periphery. In his conclusion, Plamper moves beyond retrospective analysis to outline a concrete framework for rethinking German citizenship and community. In doing so, he underscores a vital lesson: when evaluated through a long-term historical lens, the story of migration to Germany emerges as a remarkably successful transformation. Against the backdrop of contemporary political polarisation, Plamper's historical perspective provides a necessary and encouraging blueprint for both the present and the future.
