Panel: "Migration in/and Ego Documents"

Sonia Cancia, Concordia University/Université de Montréal, Canada

“My dearest love...” Love, Longing and Desire in Immigrant Correspondence between Italy and Canada, 1946-1960

Just one day after the woman he adored had boarded the steamship-liner heading for Halifax, Canada in March 1957, Giordano Rossini wrote to Ester, hoping she would receive his words en route as she and her siblings left their native Rome. As the love letters of this collection illustrate, the migration of a loved one engendered a particular space, arguably forcing correspondents to carve out a space of their own for them to sustain relationships and stay in touch until an early reunion. Through this unique source of communication, women and men penned their most-intimate thoughts, emotions and desire in order to stay in touch and for their ties through kinship, love and friendship to remain fervidly alive, despite the physical distances between them in international migration. The personal letter--one of the most ancient, yet most affordable and available forms of communication widely-used well into the postwar era in many corners of the globe--enabled lovers and family members to write "una bella lettera" [a beautiful letter] on a frequent and regular basis.  The collections of intimate letters that I have identified in households of Italian immigrants in Canada are infused with what Janet Altman has called "emotional energies", along with a myriad of creative expressions reaffirming bonds of love, affection, and communion together with a mix of emotions evidenced in light of physical absence. By drawing from findings of my book, Families, Lovers, and their Letters: Italian Postwar Migration to Canada (University of Manitoba Press, 2010), in this paper, I suggest that these extraordinary narratives exchanged in a context of international migration offer a kaleidoscopic window into the emotional and creative engines of the imagination of individuals in postwar Italy and Canada. By bringing to light these literary troves through historical lens, this paper seeks to reveal a captivating gateway into the intersecting emotional and imaginary universes that enveloped the lives of Italian migrants and loved ones, and their relationships experienced half a world away.



Wladimir Fischer, University of Vienna

Workers write their Lives. Three Autobiographies by Balkan Migrants in the Iron Range Mining Regions of Minnesota

Narratives on the Self are always more than chronicles of life-stages, they are re/constructing a self-image and negotiating it to imagined or real interlocutors. History projects on the North Minnesotan Iron Range mining region have yielded in the 1970ies fascinating examples of workers’ and migrants’ autobiographies which not only tell us about the hardships of South Slavic immigrant laborers in, before and after the Great Depression, the pressure of Americanization and the interaction of individuals with ethnic and class identity politics, but also about the ways workers wanted to see themselves, how they wanted to be seen and how this is about dignity.



Michael Müller, University of Mainz, Germany

Self centered documents of central-european emigrants to Brazil, Argentine and Chile in the 19th and early 20th century

„Auswandererquellen“, i.e. documents of emigrants (letters, memoirs and diaries) are extremely invaluable, significant and profitable self centered historical documents, which illuminate exemplarily the fundamental process of the European mass emigration towards the two Americas in the 19th and early 20th century and their political, cultural, social, economic and demographic causes (the so called “push- and pull factors) in a particular perspective. As documents of Central European emigrants to the USA have yet been investigated in a far-ranging manner, the related discussion is quite advanced. In contrary, the emigration to South America yet has not been investigated up to the same level. There are significant less recent studies and editions relating to the southern part of the American continent. The main goal of the presented investigation is to record the enormous quantity of yet unreleased sources in numerous Archives and Libraries in Brazil, Argentine and Chile in a handbook, especially the particular archives of German immigration in Chile (the Emil-Held-Archiv in Santiago de Chile) and Brazil (the Benno-Mentz-Archiv in Porto Alegre/Rio Grande do Sul and the Telmo Müller-Museum in São Leopoldo, as well as the Library of the Martius-Staden Instite in São Paulo and the UniSinos-University in São Leopoldo in Rio Grande do Sul), furthermore the National Archives and National Libraries in Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile, as well as the various municipal and regional archives in the mentioned countries. For example, the Emil Held-Archiv preserves a documentation of about 11.000 German families in Chile with 60.000 file cards and 42.000 documents – a unique heritage, yet not investigated and published.



Edith Saurer und Li Gerhalter, University of Vienna

Wrapped-Up Memory.
Things and Their Order in the Estate of Martha Teichmann (New York, 1909 1977)

In 1909, 21-year-old Martha Teichmann migrated to the US to work as a housemaid; she lived there until her death in 1977. Her considerable estate contains several kinds of documents: in addition to roughly 800 correspondence items there are, for example, about 300 photographs and various official documents as well as collection items and other objects. The estate’s structure follows an order that could be called an “order of memory”. In our lecture, we will focus on the following two aspects.

1. “The Order of Things”: In estates mainly consisting of correspondence and papers, the included objects (usually) have no (or only minor) material but rather symbolic value. Their owner has a special relationship with them as carriers of memory. Martha Teichmann’s estate, for example, includes a ring acquired during World War I, when she participated in the patriotic campaign “Gold gab ich für Eisen” (Gold I Gave For Iron)¹.

2. The order of memory relies on a classification system, i.e. which documents are archived together, how are they packaged, which relationships does the owner create between the documents. Are the documents from the countries of origin and destination collected together, into which contexts are they put? How does the owener document the structure of her relationships with persons from the country of origin, and of those with persons from her “new” environment - an environment where e.g. the migrant Martha Teichmann spent the most part of her life.

¹ The ring is engraved “Dem alten Vaterland die Treue zu beweisen / Gab ich in schwerer Zeit Gold für dieses Eisen.“ („To prove my faithfulness to the old fatherland / I gave gold for this iron in hard times.“)


Traude Bollauf, University of Vienna

Emigration by Domestic Permit. How Jewish women from Austria and Germany could escape to England

From 1933 until the final closing of the borders of the Third Reich about 60.000 persons expelled from Germany and former Austria, later acknowledged as “refugees from Nazi oppression”, found refuge in Great Britain. Nearly 20.000 of them came into the country as domestic servants, the vast majority being Jewish females between 18 and 45. A very large number came from former Austria. The peak of this refugee movement fell into the period between the “Anschluss” and the beginning of World War II.
This specific immigration can only be understood as part of a longer tradition of placing German-speaking young women as “Hausgehilfinnen” in British families: The Domestic Permit – issued by the British Ministry of Labour – enabled British employers in the 1920s and 1930s to engage foreign domestic servants for a limited period of time. After the “Anschluss” – and especially after the Novemberpogrom – this document opened the most important way for Jewish women to find refuge in England.
The goal of the research was to find out in detail, how a refugee movement of that size could emerge in a country with a rather restrictive policy of immigration and how the system of engaging domestic servants developed into a system of refugee relief.