“The gastarbeiters built everything for us.” Migrations, Memories, and Emptiness in the Dalmatian Hinterland

This essay traces the intersections between migration, (de)industrialization, and memory in Imotska krajina in Croatia and western Herzegovina, contiguous regions with a long and rich history of out-migration. Building mainly on interviews and recent field observations, we argue that the meaning of migration has substantially changed since the so-called gastarbeiter migrations. In the 1970s and 80s, labor migrants invested, among other things, in new industrial facilities. Investment of this kind is uncommon today because the region has suffered almost total deindustrialization. Most of the gastarbeiter factories have not survived. Yet, the abandoned factory buildings, monuments to gastarbeiters, and the recollections of migrants and their families sustain vivid memories of migration and the hopes as well as fears connected with it. Migration creates emptiness but also new “somethings”. We argue that memories are another important form of social remittance that not only transform a place but also perpetuate migration.

Ulf Brunnbauer

Ulf Brunnbauer


Ulf Brunnbauer is Academic Director of the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS) in Regensburg, Germany. He has a PhD in history from the University of Graz (1999) and a Habilitation from the Free University of Berlin (2006). In 2008 he was appointed Professor of the History of Southeast and East Europe at the University of Regensburg. His last book is the co-authored monograph In den Stürmen der Transformation. Zwei Werften zwischen Sozialismus und EU (Suhrkamp, 2022; an English translation is forthcoming with University of Toronto Press). Ulf Brunnbauer explores the social history of Southeastern Europe since the 19th century, with a focus on labor and migration.
 

Sara Žerić

Sara Žerić


Sara Žerić has been a doctoral researcher at IOS Regensburg since 2021 working on her doctoral thesis "Gastarbeiters as agents of development in Socialist Yugoslavia". She has an M.A. in History from the University of Pula, Croatia. In July 2022, Sara Žerić joined the research project “Transnational Families, Farms and Firms: Migrant Entrepreneurs in Kosovo and Serbia Since the 1960s” at IOS Regensburg as a researcher. She is interested in the social history of socialist Yugoslavia, especially in the process of migration, modernization, and women’s history.


Articles

Contemporary
Southeastern Europe

CTA CURRENT ISSUE CTA bg line CTA bg Dots