Becoming German: Immigration, conformity, and identity politics in Whilhelminian Berlin, 1880-1914

The practice of identity politics in Berlin allowed the various ethnic groups of the city to interact in ways that sometimes confirmed, but also frequently belied the simple classification of residents into foreigners and citizens. Interactions within minority groups and between those groups and the majority culture contributed to the emergence of a vocabulary for dealing with immigrants' complex identities and supported a developing sense of Germany as a land of immigration. This dissertation primarily addresses the attitudes of the city's minority communities toward germanization, with the attitudes of the German majority appearing only at those points where the state and German press interacted with and commented on im/migrant life. The home, schools, churches, and associations of Berlin constituted those spaces in which im/migrant communities transformed themselves into an image that simultaneously met the demands placed on them by the surrounding German culture (most notably the insistence on linguistic conformity) and at the same time permitted them to recreate those ties which constituted and recreated their minority ethnic communities from generation to generation. Citizenship law drew sharp lines between citizens and non citizens, and made it difficult for those not in possession of German citizenship or ancestry to immigrate or naturalize. However, outside of those legal structures remained abundant opportunities for immigrants to construct a richer understanding of the process of becoming German. This dissertation focuses on the materials from the minority communities of Berlin and those German state and civic agencies which dealt with im/migrants. Sources include published and archival materials from the minority press, minority civic associations, churches, and public and private schools. These materials are used to argue that before 1914, Berliners had begun to developed assimilation ideologies common in other immigration countries. The practice of identity in Berlin was much more fluid and complex than the simple dichotomies represented in citizenship law, blending foreign and native cultures into new, assimilated, but still distinct German-minority identities.