Mobility and Modernity: Migration in Germany, 1820-1989 (review)

Hochstadt has written what will long remain the definitive work on German urban migration and population turnover. Beyond the accessible annual tabulations reported in Statistisches Jahrbuch deutscher Städte, the amount of material he has unearthed in archives and obscure official publications is staggering. He is extremely meticulous in scrutinizing his source for errors and internal consistency. In doing so, he offers important correctives to the seminal work on the subject undertaken by Dieter Langewiesche, and a bold new statement of the role played by migration in 19th century society. In a long introductory chapter, Hochstadt takes issue with the ideological blinders that have distorted much migration research, especially castigating modernization theorists and others for their untested assumptions of an immobile preindustrial past, and postmodernists for their elitism in restricting their analysis to “creators of texts, a tiny and highly selective minority” (5)—something that was as obvious back when quantitative methods first came into vogue as it is now when they seem to be going out. The first substantive chapter presents some remarkable but unique community-level evidence from the Düsseldorf district, showing little distinction in migration rates between industrial and agricultural areas in the early 19th century. Looking next at mobility in cities across Germany up to World War I, Hochstadt finds that the upward trends documented by Langewiesche are exaggerated, because the series begins during a trough in 1881, and a changing data base over time included ever more smaller cities with higher mobility rates. There was indeed an upsurge of migration intensity in the 19th century, with peak annual influxes approaching 20 percent of the resident population. However, this hardly fits into a modernization paradigm. Migration rates began climbing well before industrial takeoff, and began their downturn as early as 1900, with populations becoming increasingly stable through the 20th century. Moreover, from the limited evidence available, rural populations appear to have been as volatile or more so than urban ones. Migrants were disproportionately concentrated in the young adult phase of the life cycle, which may account for much of the socioeconomic differential in migration propensity as well. Migration “efficiency,” the ratio of net to gross migration, was extremely low, only around 5 percent—something often not apparent from the data until the underenumeration of outmigrants was corrected after the next census. Many of the driving forces which Hochstadt identifies behind this volatility lay outside the industrial arena, above all the high proportion of small, part-time agricultural operations and the increasing seasonality of agriculture in the 19th century. It should be noted that the peaks of urban migration turnover coincided with peaks in the economic cycle, providing evidence for urban pull as well as rural push. Nevertheless, Hochstadt’s findings are as important for understanding rural social change as they are relevant to the makings and internal functioning of an urban working class.

Cogently argued, the book reads surprisingly well considering that the only individuals it treats by name are scholars rather than migrants. Hochstadt hammers home the difference between temporary and permanent migration, and his preference for population registers over census data—which usually records only whether people are currently residing at their birthplace, without reference to past or future behavior. Methodologically, the book relies primarily on the type of statistics—percentages and per-capita rates—that official city statisticians used in their original publications. A handful of bivariate correlations are mostly relegated to footnotes; multiple regression is deliberately avoided. Except for one brief excursion into algebra, the book is fully accessible to the mathematically challenged. Whether indicative of changing intellectual fashions or delays in production, the monumental 32 page bibliography of secondary sources includes only a dozen titles appearing after 1992.

Excellent as the book is on tracing the changing volume of migration and the socioeconomic context, rural as well as urban, that conditioned it, a somewhat broader perspective would have been helpful. There is very little attempt to assess the disruptiveness...