ABSTRACT

Immigrants and Foreigners in Central and Eastern Europe during the Twentieth Century challenges widespread conceptions of Central and Eastern European countries as merely countries of origin. It sheds light on their experience of immigration and the establishment of refugee regimes at different stages in the history of the region.

The book brings together a variety of case studies on Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, and the experiences of return migrants from the United States, displaced Hungarian Jews, desperate German social democrats, resettled Magyars, resourceful tourists, labour migrants, and Zionists. In doing so, it highlights and explores the variety of experience across different forms of immigration and discusses its broader social and political framework.

Presenting the challenges within the history of immigration in Eastern Europe and considering both immigration to the region and emigration from it, Immigrants and Foreigners in Central and Eastern Europe during the Twentieth Century provides a new perspective on, and contribution to, this ongoing subject of debate.

chapter 1|26 pages

Refugees and migrants

Perceptions and categorizations of moving people, 1789–1938

chapter 2|20 pages

Return migration and social disruption in the Polish Second Republic

A reassessment of resettlement regimes

chapter 3|20 pages

Jewish railway car dwellers in interwar Hungary 1

Citizenship and uprootedness

chapter 4|14 pages

Refugees from Nazi Germany in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s

‘In the long run, people will go down here’

chapter 5|17 pages

Communities of resettlement

Integrating migrants from the Czechoslovak–Hungarian population exchange in post-war Hungary, 1947–1948

chapter 6|9 pages

Passports and profits

Foreigners on the trade routes of the Polish People’s Republic (PPR)

chapter 7|14 pages

Socialist mobility, postcolonialism and global solidarity

The movement of people from the Global South to socialist Hungary

chapter 8|18 pages

Migration, gender and family

A bottom-up perspective on migration, return migration and nation-building in 1950s Poland and Israel