Crossing Germany: Eastern European Transmigrants and Saxon State Surveillance, 1900-1924

Abstract

This dissertation investigates migrant registration and control stations in Germany that served as a pre-“screening system” (Dorothee Schneider) to US immigration checkpoints such as Ellis Island. In the late-nineteenth, early-twentieth centuries, large numbers of eastern Europeans passed through Germany on their way to northern European ports to sail to the Americas. Studying transmigration, the “process of migration” as Gur Alroey defines it, gives insight into the economic and state mechanisms that controlled migration and which routes migrants took as they travelled overseas. In 1894 due to health concerns and costs incurred by transporting rejected immigrants back from the United States, the Prussian state and German shipping companies set up control stations along the Prussian-Russian border. Here steamship agents reviewed both the travelers’ health and financial capability. The stations gave preferential treatment to German steamship customers, yet the German government also had a vested interest: these checkpoints prevented ‘undesirable immigrants’ from entering its territories. Sizeable eastern European transmigration appeared not only in Prussia, but also in another eastern German province, Saxony. This dissertation focuses particularly on a transmigrant registration station (opened in 1904) at the railroad hub of Leipzig and checkpoints (opened in 1905) on the Saxon-Bohemian border. The growing literature on transmigration has focused on the influence American immigration policy and German steamship companies had over these stations. Instead, I emphasize the vital role the German state played in migration surveillance, with health officials and policemen managing the movement of the travelers. This research challenges the historiographical notion of lax state migration control prior to World War I and enriches understanding of the journey European migrants undertook before arriving in the New World.