This panel considers the relationship between migrant experiences, administrative norms, and legal transitions in twentieth-century Central Europe by investigating how ethnic and religious minority populations shaped juridical categories of belonging in the Weimar Republic, the post-WWII Austrian Second Republic, and the German Federal Republic after 1990. Framing migrant communities as active shapers, rather than merely passive objects, of these polities’ legal systems, this panel examines how ordinary German citizens of Polish descent requesting name changes in the Weimar-era Ruhr region, Bosnian Muslim migrants in post-WWII Austria seeking state recognition of Islam as a religious community, and Vietnamese asylum seekers advocating for humanitarian protection in 1990s Germany navigated complex administrative procedures to lay claim to new forms of political and national membership. Its presenters thereby seek to contribute to ongoing scholarly debates about constructing legal histories “from below,” interpreting continuities and ruptures in twentieth-century Central European administrative regimes, and studying transnational contestations over categories of sociopolitical belonging in modern Germany, Austria, and Poland.

Centering migrant voices in an historical record largely dominated by state authorities while probing the limits of state archives, the papers on this panel highlight that supplicants from these migrant communities effectively constructed innovative notions of legal rights while sometimes invoking older administrative paradigms from previous regimes. Nikolas Weyland begins the panel by examining applications for “Germanizing” name changes from German citizens of Polish descent in the 1920s Ruhr, highlighting how these ordinary supplicants shaped prevailing understandings of ethnic transformation in both interwar Germany and Poland. Weyland underscores that many such applicants adeptly appealed not only to older Imperial-era notions of Germanization but also helped to develop newer conceptions of the Ruhr region’s absorptive capacities in their requests, to which state authorities frequently assented. Elizabeth Howell then turns the panel’s focus to the late-twentieth century Austrian Second Republic. Howell illustrates that members of the Muslim Social Service (MSS), an Austrian organization founded by Bosnian Muslim migrants, played an active role in facilitating the Second Republic’s eventual recognition of Islam as a legal community in 1979. Investigating the concerted publication activities of the MSS and its engagement with state officials, Howell underscores the impact which both the legacy of Muslims’ presence in the Habsburg Empire and the counterimage of Islam in the German Federal Republic exercised on policy in post-WWII Austria. Lastly, Paige Newhouse moves the panel’s attention to the cases of Vietnamese laborers in the post-1990 Federal Republic, underscoring how they had to renegotiate their status in a country new to them. Newhouse argues that Vietnamese workers used the courts to challenge the foreigner registration offices for residency, thus laying claims to belonging in a post-unity Germany. Newhouse thus situates these Vietnamese migrants as crucial contributors to ongoing debates about national identity and migrancy in the post-1990 Federal Republic. By bringing together this set of emerging scholars whose research reaches across twentieth-century Central Europe, both geographically and temporally, this panel aims to intervene in broader scholarly debates over identity formation and forms of legal belonging in the region.