Policing the Migrants: Narratives of Border Crossings during and after the Habsburg Empire

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Among the various social concerns in the fin de siècle Austro-Hungarian Empire, falling population numbers and women’s purity generated great public distress and moral condemnation. This resulted in numerous attempts to control migration, particularly of those who engaged in, or facilitated, the sale of sex. By the turn of the twentieth-century, over one million people had migrated across and out of the Habsburg Empire. For many contemporaries, migration was associated with criminal activities and sexual exploitation. Sensationalist court reporting on infamous trials against travel agents, procurers, as well as „seducers“ provoked frequent moral outcries in the Austrian bourgeois society, and the debates were especially heated when Jews were involved. With the rise of modern antisemitism, imaginary conceptions of deviant and dangerous Jews in general, and their sexualities in particular, took center stage. As opposed to having been the result of wicked travel agents or procurers, however, Poles, Ukrainians, as well as Jews frequently chose to migrate as a result of their precarious living conditions.
This panel takes a look at those who challenged the Habsburg’s strict understanding of political borders and moral limits, as well as in its successor states. It examines illegal actors and discusses the different narratives of trafficking before and after the First World War by asking: Which actors were involved in criminal activity in the context of border crossings? How (and by whom) were the images of them and trafficked persons generated, shaped, and disseminated? How did violent conflict influence these narratives?

Sub Unit

• History: Central and Southeast Europe, 1800-1918

Chair

• Aleksandra Jakubczak, Columbia U / POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews (Poland)

Papers

• The 'Migrant' and Her Jewish 'Trafficker,' 1868-1880 - Ruth Ennis, Leipzig U (Germany)

• 'Dealers of Souls': Jewish Criminals in the Habsburg Empire at the Fin de Siècle - Margarita Lerman, Hebrew U of Jerusalem (Israel)

• Sex Sells: Female Migration in 'White Slavery Movies' - Elisabeth Sylvia Janik, TU Berlin (Germany)

Discussant

• Keely Stauter-Halsted, U of Illinois at Chicago