Junior Professorship ›Migration and Integration of Russian-Germans‹

The junior professorship "Migration and Integration of Russian-Germans", which is unique in Germany, conducts innovative, intercultural and interdisciplinary migration research on Russian-Germans in the past and present. It is funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM) and is based at the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS) and the Department of History at Osnabrück University.

Russian-German history is an integral part of the history of European settlement and migration in the 18th-20th centuries and, within this framework, is located in the contexts of settlement colonialism, transatlantic migration, forced migration and East-West migration. This approach results in a focus on geographically distinct spaces that were placed in relation to each other through the migration movements of German settlers and their descendants: Germany or German-speaking Central Europe, various regions of the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union, and North and South America. In this way, research into the history and present of Russian-Germans is anchored as part of modern transnational historiography and migration research.

A further research focus is on the strategies of Russian-Germans in the Federal Republic of Germany for finding a home and integrating. The examination of concrete everyday life plays an important role here. Cultural practices such as language, religion, clothing, housing, music, literature and food allow cultural change and identity construction to be traced and compared with other migrant groups and countries.

The junior professorship communicates its research findings through national and international publications and conferences as well as through teaching that is closely linked to research. As part of the Master's degree course in International Migration and Intercultural Relations (IMIB), students are taught historical and methodological skills that enable them to conduct research in the field of migration and integration. Furthermore, the junior professorship is firmly integrated into the interdisciplinary work of IMIS, for example through participation in the Research Training Group "The Production of Migration".

The research of the junior professorship "Migration and Integration of Russian-Germans" is located in historical, social science and cultural anthropological migration research.

Hans-Christian Petersen worked on a biography of Karl Stumpp (1896-1982). Karl Stumpp remains the central figure of Russian-German history and identity politics to this day. Both in the interwar period and after 1945, he played a key role in constituting the field of research and in founding Russian-German interest organizations. During the Second World War, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, he headed the "Sonderkommando Dr. Stumpp", which carried out 'racial' censuses of the population in occupied Ukraine. A well-founded biographical study of his person is still a desideratum of research, which the project aims to fill.

In her dissertation project, Anna Flack investigated Russian-Germans in Barnaul in western Siberia. Based on the nutritional behavior of individual case studies, the material conditions as well as cultural and social orientations and behaviors used by non-resettled and remigrated Russian-Germans to construct affiliations are traced. Among other things, the study illustrates how diverse, situation-dependent and even contradictory affiliations can be. This is also relevant in the context of Germany's migration society.

With his monographs The Unchosen Ones: Diaspora, Nation, and Migration in Israel and Germany and Post-Soviet Migration in Germany: An Introduction, the former holder of the professorship, Dr. Jannis Panagiotidis, has presented fundamental works on the topic of (late) repatriate migration from a historical and contemporary comparative perspective. The anthology Jenseits der Volksgruppe: Neue Perspektiven auf die Russlanddeutschen zwischen Russland, Deutschland und Amerika (ed. with Victor Dönninghaus and Hans-Christian Petersen) lays the foundations for a transnational, global and interrelated historical examination of the research field of Russian Germans across epochs and regions.