Demography and Demographers in Modern Germany: Social Science and Ideology across Political Regimes

The history of German research and writing about migration has been heavily influenced by politics. The assumptions and methods of successive generations of migration researchers demonstrate the interplay of social science and politics across very different political regimes. Soon after serious research began in the late nineteenth century, migration researchers divided into two camps. Urban statisticians with liberal political ideas used city migration registration data to analyze the circulatory movement of migrants within Germany. Conservative writers used census data to argue that migration was essentially movement from countryside to city, and was politically and morally injurious to the German people. These two sides hardened after World War I, as the conservative side increasingly incorporated racist ideas into their critique of migration. This debate continued even after the Nazis took power in 1933 with the competing publications of Rudolf Heberle and Wilhelm Brepohl. Heberle was forced to leave Germany and Brepohl became the Nazis’ favorite analyst of migration. After 1945, Brepohl retained his standing as a leading migration researcher in the German Federal Republic. The dominance of this conservative interpretation of migration continued into the 1970s. In recent decades, the writings of the liberal statisticians from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been rediscovered, and German migration research has shifted again toward a more empirically based understanding of migration.