Heated contestations over boundaries of citizenship defined Germany’s twentieth-century socio-political development and continue to prompt intense discussion in the contemporary moment. During a twentieth century marked by theretofore unprecedented human mobility, violent ethnonationalism, mass politicization, and ideological diffusion, Germany transitioned from an autocratic constitutional monarchy to a democratic republic, descended into a fascist dictatorship, became divided into a western-oriented parliamentary democracy and a Soviet-allied communist dictatorship, and reunified in the early 1990s. How exactly did understandings of citizenship among ordinary Germans and state officials evolve during this tumultuous era in German history?

This conference panel seeks to explore persistent continuities and new directions vis-à-vis conceptions of citizenship in twentieth-century Germany, linking analyses of developments in the German Empire (1871-1918), Weimar Republic (1918-1933), Nazi dictatorship (1933-1945), German Democratic Republic (1949-1990), and Federal Republic of Germany (1949-present). At its core, this panel aims to examine the relationship between beliefs about citizenship, attitudes toward mobility—both of human subjects and political movements—and ideas about race and ethnicity in twentieth-century Germany.

Considering migratory movements among Polish-speaking communities in the Ruhr in the early twentieth century, the naturalization requests of migrants from developing countries educated in the Federal Republic, and the diffusion of state-sponsored programs of antiracism in the GDR, the presentations for this proposed panel cover different time periods and regime types in modern Germany, but they cohere centrally around an examination of this core thematic question. How did enhanced cross-border mobility—of people and ideologies—and understandings of race and ethnicity influence how state officials and ordinary Germans crafted boundaries of citizenship?

This panel’s central theme lends itself particularly well to reflections on continuities and ruptures in modern Germany’s sociopolitical history, a topic that has prompted intense discussion among historians for decades. But this panel should also appeal to scholars who study citizenship, migration, ethnonationalism, race, internationalism, and public and institutional memory in other polities and time periods, as its three presentations speak to the wider scholarly literature on these themes and will reflect more broadly on these important concepts.

A fundamental goal of this panel is to situate these debates over citizenship in Germany within a broader transnational context, highlighting that wider global processes—such as the formation of new states in interwar Europe, the increased presence of university students and vocational trainees from the Global South in post-WWII Europe, and the strengthening of transnational socialist solidarities grounded in narratives of antiracism from the 1940s onward—lay intertwined with these important contestations over belonging. The three presentations on this panel will thus measure the complex relationship between “peculiarly” German political circumstances and institutional legacies and broader global developments.

In sum, the presentations on this proposed panel have the potential to yield interesting insights into perspectives on citizenship across different regime types in twentieth-century Germany and, more broadly, to measure the impact that Germany’s embeddedness in transnational networks exerted on the country’s socio-political development during this momentous period in the country’s history.