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Lower—Class Immigrants in Wilhelmine Berlin*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Hsi-Huey Liang
Hsi-Huey Liang
Affiliation:
Vassar College
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Extract

During the Second Empire, tens of thousands of poor people from East and West Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania, and Posen moved to Berlin every year. They came primarily to improve their economic position. A large number of them were transient agricultural laborers who had been accosted by private employment agents in Berlin railway stations. Others were provincial craftsmen in declining trades who sought to start a new life in the city: for example the cigar maker hoping to make enough money to buy a tobacco shop. Coming on the mere chance of a job, such men were likely to end up as anything from a coal carrier or hackdriver to kitchen help in the Charité hospital. Most of them became factory hands. Journeymen on the tramp who arrived on foot from as far as the Bohemian border were better off as far as job opportunities went. They had not as yet burnt their bridges and could still move on with a small travel allowance from their guilds if nothing lucrative turned up in Berlin. But Berlin needed young looksmiths, turners, carpenters, molders, tinsmiths, and harnessmakers. (In 1905,72 per cent of the workers in Ludwig Loewe's machine-tool factory were immigrants from outside Berlin.) There were also those who became Berliners in the course of their military service: after two or three years of garrison duty in or near Berlin, a country boy often had no wish to renounce the “big-city life” and would go to great lengths to find a living there.

Type
Articles
Information
Central European History , Volume 3 , Issue 1-2 , March 1970 , pp. 94 - 111
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 1970

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