The end of the First World War in November 1918 marked a watershed moment in the international migration of human beings. Soldiers demobilized and returned home, colonial soldiers were dispatched back to their native lands, and the redrawing of the world map by the treaty-makers at Versailles sparked a shift among people who did not care for the new boundary lines. Nation-states, emboldened by their strengthened wartime authority, began controlling the movement of their citizens in unheard of ways. Restrictive immigration laws meant that people were no longer welcome where they once had been, and could less often choose where they wanted to live. Peopleâs racial and ethnic identities more often restricted their ability to change their residences. 1 An additional development, the requirement that travelers carry government-issued passports, indicated that citizensâ movements were now being monitored by state bureaucracies, and it was in the pages of those passports where peopleâs names, nationality, appearance, and sometimes their religionâtheir identitiesâwere recorded for the world to see. World War veterans, members of the younger and more volatile generation of Europeans, whose heads had been filled with expectations of victory and heroism in 1914, were among those most likely to want to change their postwar circumstances. German ex-servicemen found the defeated society to which they returned in late 1918 particularly burdensome, considering their recent experiences with that colossal, bureaucracy-to-end-all-bureaucracies, the German military.
Before August 1914, Great War veteran Johann Grossmann had fought fires around the shipyards in the northern port city of Hamburg. He spent the war years aboard ship in the German Navy. Upon his discharge in 1918, the attempts he made at regaining the order and pleasures of his former civilian life were met by failure, and nearly all his shortcomings he attributed to the war and to his nationâs defeat in it. Grossmann readily expressed his disillusionment with German postwar society when he relocated back to his childhood home of FĂŒrth, in northern Bavaria. As he later explained in his memoir, the much-revered Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, commander of the Germany military and later president of the Weimar Republic, had promised all honorably discharged servicemen the opportunity to own a piece of land âwith which to grow their own cabbage.â This gift was to be regarded as a reward for their military service. Grossmann, an aspiring farmer, first felt the scales drop from his eyes when he learned the truth about Hindenburgâs promise:
As my child was about to be born, I asked at the bank how I could obtain the land that Hindenburg had promised. The bank official rejected my query in one sentence. So, I asked a member of the Bavarian Parliament how I could acquire the land that veterans had been guaranteed. He replied, âYouâll need 21,000 German Marks to buy land.â He was a war cripple. The two of us, a war cripple and a man without a Fatherland, laughed the laugh of two cuckolded fools. 2
Grossmann undoubtedly felt foolish to have believed Hindenburgâs outlandish promise. In the last sentence of the passage, the veteran compared different losses that had occurred as a result of the war: loss of limbs and renunciation of homeland. In referring to both men as having been cuckolded by the war, he compared soldiering with the intense shame of sexual betrayal. The nation, for which he had made the heroic, larger-than-life sacrifice expected of him when he went to war, had humiliated him, making him feel small.
Grossmanâs experiences mirror what historian Adam R. Seipp has called the âcrises of reciprocityâ that plagued postwar nations during the period of demobilization. Veterans expected rewards commensurate with the sacrifices that they had made, and nations, according to Seipp, fell far short of the payback expected by returning Great War soldiers. 3 As the navy manâs setbacks continued, his cynicism deepened. Upon his discharge, he had looked for work in Hamburg for two years without success. Moving back to FĂŒrth had not relieved his unemployment. He began to imagine emigration as the answer to his problems. He visited the local office of the Reichswanderungsamt (RWA), or German Immigration Bureau. Here, he asked for information about circumstances in other countries. The RWA, established in 1919, was set up by the government ostensibly to act as a sort of clearinghouse of information for prospective emigrants. The RWA official inquired whether he would stay in Germany, if he were to find a job. âOf course,â Grossmann replied. The next day, according to his memoir, he was offered a job at a factory. He did not believe this development to be coincidental. Grossmann interpreted his encounters at the RWA office with sarcasm. He believed that instead of helping Germans who were desperate to leave the economic and political chaos that was Weimar Germany, the RWA was actually trying to keep would-be emigrants from leaving the country. 4
The only solace he found in postwar Germany was a philosophy course he took through a Volkshochschule, or worker educational program. Like nearly everything else he encountered in his postwar life, the veteran interpreted the program through the lens of Germanyâs defeat. Because of war reparations outlined in the Treaty of Versailles, he opined, German goods would not be competitive in world markets. One avenue to making German products more attractive was to educate workers, so the Volkshochschulen were established to facilitate that need. Adult education courses had existed prior to Weimar, but their numbers exploded in the 1920s. Explicitly mentioned in the Weimar constitution, the Volkshochschulen idea was designed to foster unity throughout German society and personal happiness in the individual. 5 Since the philosophy course did not require examinations, Grossmann chose to enroll in it. He and his fellow students made excursions together in the Bavarian countryside. The course captivated him and âheld him prisonerâ; thoughts of leaving Germany faded. He found an inner peace in the natural world, although his dream of farming never left him. Right before he boarded a ship bound for North America, he told an emigration official that he wanted to farm so that he could grow his own food in order to feed and sustain himself. 6
Grossmann did not marry the mother of his child, and was therefore obliged to pay child support under German law. Suddenly, the owner of the factory where he worked reduced his hours. His sister began paying his rent for him. The veteranâs frustrations with the contradictory directions he received from officials at the social services office, as to how much child support he would have to pay under his reduced income, reawakened his desire to leave the country. It is possible that escaping the child support payments motivated him to leave Germany, too. In any case, he finally made his move in 1927. Once aboard the steamer bound for Canada, he met a fellow German Ă©migrĂ© who summed up his own sorry departing circumstances: âFather scolded, mother cried, and the policeman refused to give me a passportâ (Germans owing taxes could not obtain a passport 7 ). Grossmann disembarked in Nova Scotia, traveled west and eventually purchased land and established his farm in the Peace River region of British Columbia. 8 Johann Grossmann was one of just over 600,000 Germans emigrating abroad during the Weimar Republic from 1919 to 1932. The vast majority of those disembarked on Ellis Island. 9
The Bavarianâs inability to reach his lifeâs dreamâplanting crops on his own plot of land in Germanyâconstituted a common motivating factor for leaving the Fatherland, according to RWA chief Walter Jung. The desire for SelbstĂ€ndigung, or the ability to stand on oneâs own two feet, prompted all emigrants who left Germany in the early 1920s, according to Jung. The war, and especially their nationâs defeat in it, had translated among Germans into a desire to ânicht mehr Knecht sein,â or to no longer be a slave. Jung believed that workers wanted to stop being slaves to capital. 10 But the master Grossmann sought to escape from was the German government and perhaps memories of the war itself, but not capitalism. German Great War widows, too, sought independence from men and from government authority, according to Helena Hurwitz-Stranzâs Kriegerwitwen gestalten Ihr Schicksal. 11 Widows such as Johanna Boldt, who lost her husband in the war, relished the new economic freedom they achieved when they earned their own bread. 12
Grossmannâs memoir says nothing about his war experiences, though one might judge by the opening passage that they had not been positive. His irritations with German bureaucrats may have begun during his military service. Of the German veterans immigrating to USA, those who wrote their memories of their time in military service expressed a recurring frustration with (among other things) a lack of knowledge. The enlisted complained of not being told by their commanding officers where they were marching to, of not knowing what they would be doing once they arrived, nor even the reasons why their nation was at war. If servicemen assumed their superiors were privy to inside information, officersâ memoirs indicate the presence of the same irritating shroud of ignorance darkening their mental horizons. 13 Decisions were made elsewhere and were changed for inexplicable reasons. By autumn 1918, soldiers were indicating their frustrations with not-knowing more frequently by refusing orders. 14 The feeling of powerlessness hit home for surviving soldiers who returned to wives and children, because the authority once presumed to be wielded by the father no longer operated in the old, expected ways in postwar German society. 15 Problems reintegrating back into German society affected veteransâsuch as Johann Grossmann and another immigrating veteran, Bruno Richard Hauptmannâfor whom flight seemed to hold the only answer to their vexations. Although much has been written about the war dead, and while the multitude of war memorials demonstrate that postwar societiesâ focus remained on those sacrificed, in fact, most soldiers mobilized did not die in the war. 16
The possibility of revolution hung in the air as German soldiers demobilized, and some were politicized as they shifted from battle front to home front. Others were not. Benjamin Ziemannâs study reveals that in rural Germany, most returning veteransâ only desire was to return to their former lives, and their families simply wanted them back. The hoped-for shift from wartime to peacetime, however, blurred as the German government increased its centralized authority after the war, and millions of Germans, war veterans, war widows, and citizens not direct...