“In the mind of Russians abroad,” exclaimed a refugee living in Prague in 1926, “Czechoslovakia is a vast workshop, a laboratory, in which Russians work, study, and live a very cultural life.”Footnote 1 These metaphors invite a critical exploration of the connections between refugee protection, or its absence, and work. Hitherto, historians, including this author, have paid only scant attention to how labor migration intersected with refugee experience in the Habsburg Empire and Czechoslovakia. As a part of the conversation in the forum “Austria and the Czech Republic as Immigration Countries: Transnational Labor Migration in Historical Comparison” this by no means exhaustive article revisits the history of refugees in the territory of Czechoslovakia, from World War I until the occupation by Nazi Germany in 1939. Taking stock of existing research, it suggests alternative lines of thinking about Czechoslovak management of migrants' labor and contributes to the wider discussion about how conceptually to combine refugee studies and research on labor migration.
The separation of refugees from other migrants into a distinct legal category, demanded by refugee advocates and integrated into international and national refugee law, was foremost an outcome of the situation during and after World War I. At that time, people persecuted based on political opinions, ethnicity or “race,” religion, or for other reasons could no longer freely move together with millions of people seeking work opportunities and a new life. The difficult operation and eventual collapse of interwar refugee regimes in Europe structured the language and practice of the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. With the experience of Nazi persecution and extermination policies, responsibility for populations still stranded in Europe and against the background of the Cold War, the Convention included a definition of refugee that was based on the persecution and the denial of political and civil rights.
In its ideal form, the categorization rests on the individual's reason for leaving their original place of residence (or what is also called “migration trigger” in social science research). This article, however, adds to the growing recognition in refugee studies that migration driven by economic reasons and persecution cannot be completely separated. The end of the Cold War, growing migration pressures, and “mixed migration flows” have renewed the discussion about their connections. Some researchers invoked historical cases before the formation of the current refugee regime as alternative avenues of thinking, thereby pointing out the need to write labor back into refugee history. They have criticized the unjust exclusion of certain groups of, allegedly only economic, migrants and recognize that integration through work prevents the perpetuation of refugee situations (in camps, liminal spaces, metaphoric “waiting rooms”). Researchers have also pointed out connections between the first international refugee arrangements and the creation of the International Labour Organization in the interwar period.Footnote 2
Researching the management of German refugees in the Soviet occupation zone of post-World War II Germany and of the displaced persons (DPs) in the Western zones, Jessica Reinisch and Silvia Salvatici have shown how refugees were perceived as alienated because of their migration and how this structured ideas about their work.Footnote 3 Seeing their displacement as unnatural, “turning the refugees into workers and employees”Footnote 4 was a way to make them at home again, a form of their rehabilitation which prevented “idleness,” asocial behavior, and criminality. Joining this research direction, this article examines how Habsburg and Czechoslovak approaches to refugee labor articulated ideas that anticipated and neglected, enabled or prevented refugees' integration and rehabilitation. The impact of economic trends and needs of the labor market notwithstanding, these approaches to labor also expressed, and put into practice, diverse ideas about citizenship, current and future, in the place of refuge or in distant places. In the new nation-state that was carved out from the wider political and cultural space of the Habsburg Empire, refugee labor was interwoven with changing citizenship regimes and welfare policies. Focusing especially on the government perspective, this article identifies three broad and not mutually exclusive approaches to refugee labor that put forward different temporalities of and ideas about current and future citizenship. In that sense, refugee labor was a “laboratory” in which officials, refugees and—sometimes—humanitarian organizations negotiated where, when, and under what conditions refugees should again be turned into equal citizens.
Without progressing strictly chronologically, this article weaves together World War I refugees in the Habsburg Empire and in the emerging Czechoslovak nation-state, Russian and Ukrainian refugees who arrived in the 1920s, refugees from Nazi Germany and Austria in the 1930s, and, finally, refugees from the border areas after the Munich Agreement. For analytical purposes, I combine them into three distinct state approaches to managing refugee labor which often existed in parallel: mobilization of refugee labor in a crisis situation, the support of labor as a pathway to future citizenship, and the denial of work as a sign of statelessness. While each of the three themes deserves more detail and analysis, bringing them together here helps to illuminate and contrast the specifics of policies and the imagination of refugee work.
Neglected History of Labor Migration
The territory of Czechoslovakia has not conventionally been understood as a space of immigration, and migration has been seen there primarily through the lens of national loss or gain. Moreover, concerns over emigration overshadowed immigration as a subject of data-gathering and policies of welfare institutions in the Habsburg Empire and the interwar Czechoslovak First Republic. The newly created Czechoslovak Ministry of Welfare (Ministerstvo sociální péče) devoted much attention to analyzing, limiting, and controlling emigration, especially from the poorer regions in the eastern parts of the country.Footnote 5 The government invested time and means to keep connection to co-ethnic emigrants abroad.Footnote 6 Economic historians too were more concerned about outmigration by ethnic Czechs, Slovaks, and Carpatho-Ruthenians.Footnote 7 To this day, most of the historiography on emigration continues to reproduce ethnonational frameworks by focusing on specific ethnic groups.Footnote 8
Rare studies on borderlands and mobility in the border regions provide a more nuanced account,Footnote 9 but they do not significantly alter the overall picture. Annemarie Steidl, in her path-breaking research on migration within and from the late Habsburg Empire, analyzed the diversity and multidirectionality of migrations, stressing the connections between the different scales of human mobility. In contrast to many other studies, her research design refuses to reproduce the “methodological nationalism” and the focus on individual national groups and borders of nation-states as key categories that have structured previous migration research.Footnote 10 Research in labor migration in post-World War II Czechoslovakia, as in Europe more generally, generates significant insights: these include the expulsion of Germans and resettlement in Czechoslovak border regionsFootnote 11 and the value of labor in building socialist societies.Footnote 12
Even in the absence of large programs of labor recruitment and in-migration to interwar Czechoslovakia, the movement of people seeking work across borders was an important part of the parallel processes of nationalization and internationalization.Footnote 13 Immigration policies were related to the post-World War I option treaties, in particular the voluntary exchange of population between Czechoslovakia and Austria which contributed to the introduction of an ethnic element to the interwar citizenship regime.Footnote 14 The growing involvement of the state in the economy and welfare provision also determined approaches to refugee labor. Throughout the interwar period, the nexus between citizenship and social entitlement grew as social insurance programs were expanded and new unemployment subsidies were introduced.Footnote 15 The introduction of immigration quotas in the United States and other restrictions on overseas migration disrupted prewar migration routes and left Czechoslovakia, like other governments, searching for new mechanisms to control labor migration. These included different strategies of aligning documentary borders (border controls, visas) with cross-border labor practices that included seasonal migration. Due to the large number of Czechoslovak citizens working abroad, its government had to take into account reciprocity and possible reprisals against Czechoslovaks in other countries.
The Czechoslovak law on the protection of the domestic labor market of March 1928 was a hesitant answer to some of these challenges and obligated employers to obtain permits for every foreigner they hired. Authorities would issue them only under narrowly defined conditions, taking into account the labor market situation, making sure that the foreigner was not replacing a local worker, and only in exceptional cases considering personal or family reasons.Footnote 16 The implementation of the law, however, remained inconsistent due to imperfect registration of foreigners, unclear personal documentation, and exceptions enacted by the Ministry of Welfare or dictated by international agreements. Throughout the 1930s, with the unemployment driven by the world economic crisis, the law provided a basis for a stricter approach to foreigners seeking work in Czechoslovakia.
Mobilization of Labor
This section weaves together two refugee situations that challenged the resources and capacity of the state at times of crisis of its authority and sovereignty. Refugees fleeing into the interior of the Habsburg Empire during World War I and the those who arrived in the Bohemian Lands after the Munich Agreement arrived suddenly, on a mass scale, as a result of a major international conflagration; their refugeedom (in the sense of Peter Gatrell) was an expression of their citizenship in the country of reception. The management of their labor, however, revealed not only attempts to mobilize the workforce in a crisis situation, but also new hierarchies and cleavages within the citizenship of Cisleithania and Czechoslovakia, respectively.
By 1915, over a million people were displaced in the Habsburg Empire.Footnote 17 Refugees arrived especially from Galicia and Bukovina, threatened by Russian occupation, and later from the Italian front. Even though a large number of them returned to their often-destroyed homes after large swathes of Galicia were retaken and opened for “repatriation,” many remained in the interior of the country until the end of the war.Footnote 18 Taken by surprise by the speed and scale, the government attempted to direct the displaced populations away from major cities such as Vienna or Prague to maintain political stability and provisioning. As citizens of Cisleithania, these mostly poor refugees were entitled to social support, that—however—came at the price of increased control and curtailed mobility.Footnote 19 Needy refugees were dispatched to smaller towns or villages (called “refugee communities”) or to newly constructed refugee camps, many of which were located in Bohemia and Moravia.
With the militarization of the economy and the larger involvement of the government, refugee manpower became an important aspect of the mobilization of resources in the total war, but its effective use remained a challenge, and often a failure. In addition, new gender roles affected the world of work, as women stepped in to take over the positions and duties of men in uniform.Footnote 20 Everyday life was marked by shortages of food and other basic commodities and the state took control over the distribution of these precious goods by creating central distribution agencies and introducing rationing. The worsening situation and growing discontent found expression in complaints, hunger demonstrations of women and children still expressing loyalty to the state, and, in the second half of the war, in radical political demonstrations, strikes, and street violence.Footnote 21 The question of refugee labor was therefore measured against the inability of the government to ensure the well-being, or even survival, of the population on the “home front.” Dissatisfied and hungry citizens complained about refugees eating away the scarce resources, questioning the value of their citizenship.
To maximally exploit the remaining manpower for the war the government relied on the 1912 Kriegsleistungsgesetz (Wartime Service Law) to restrict the free choice of employment, the activity of worker organizations, and legal labor protests.Footnote 22 Using the metaphor widespread at the time, workers were thus turned into a “human motor.”Footnote 23 In similar terms, a document from the Ministry of Interior treated the refugee camps as Arbeiterdepots, “worker depots.”Footnote 24 While men of military age were drafted and removed from production, refugee bodies were to be mobilized in their place. The authorities used the system of barrack camps to redistribute refugee manpower, also attempting to offset the cost of maintenance. Especially at harvest time, large groups of mostly male refugees were recruited for agricultural work in the fields or in food production. Refugees would replace not only local men serving in the army, but also prewar seasonal migrants: in this way, the experience with earlier migration from poorer regions of the empire, especially from Galicia, influenced the labor strategies during wartime. Refugee management, however, remained a logistical challenge and was met with a lack of interest from refugees. While high on coercion, the state was weak on motivation: the pay was simply too low for refugees to voluntarily register for hard labor in distant locations. Moreover, whole families in which only one person worked would be removed from the—already low—financial support provided by the state. As a result, the authorities threatened unwilling refugees that they would be sent to a refugee camp or excluded from state support anyhow.Footnote 25 Even though roughly 135,000 refugees registered for work in 1915, their effect on the wartime economy was only modest.Footnote 26
The real work experience of refugees and their employers varied and were interpreted in gendered ways. In language linking refugees with wartime gender shifts, a mayor of a village in Central Bohemia complained in 1915 about Galician refugees' lack of engagement in agricultural work as a result of their own work ethic: “men seek only lighter work in the vicinity, which is now performed by women from the countryside, demanding a good salary in turn . . . .” Elsewhere in Bohemia, locals complained about the “inborn laziness” of Italian refugees (who were otherwise well received).Footnote 27 In other cases, however, farmers valued refugee hands. For instance, an Italian woman working in a mill in Central Bohemia later remembered: “I worked from the morning into the night for a handful of flour and a slice of bread for the family. It wasn't enough, but poverty reigned and the miller and his wife liked me . . . .”Footnote 28 In contrast to government plans, many refugees found local employment beyond the state-designed channels, opened workshops, shops or businesses, or worked informally. Jewish refugees especially in cities and towns relied on their skills, family, and other networks to make a living under the radar.
The mobilization of work under government control and planning functioned more effectively within the camps where authorities were in charge. Historian Doina Anca Cretu has proposed viewing refugee camps not only in terms of their double functions of containment and as sites of immediate material help and care but also as spaces in which officials and experts focused on rehabilitation and designs for future reintegration into society.Footnote 29 The organization of work in camps therefore expressed not only the needs of the moment, but also a civilizing mission. In practice, apart from the tasks of maintaining the camp, which included work in kitchens, washing and cleaning, and other upkeep, camp administrators opened artisan workshops that produced articles such as shoes or clothing and provided training. Given the gender and age composition, as well as the removal of fit younger men for military service or agricultural work, this production often relied on female work. While it increased the involvement of women in the economy beyond the scope of family, rehabilitation through work in these refugee spaces seemed to maintain traditional gender roles and, therefore, negated rather than advanced the gender shifts apparent in wartime society.
Two decades later, the approach to refugee labor exhibited significant similarities. Czechoslovak authorities counted about 200,000 refugees from the border areas ceded to Nazi Germany as a result of the Munich Agreement by the end of 1938 and their number only grew due to the flight of people from Slovakia and Subcarpathia in 1939. The tribulations of these refugees became a visible marker of the country's humiliation, including loss of territory, economic and transport disruptions, and political dependence, accompanied by a turn toward an authoritarian, nationalist and anti-semitic political regime. Several weeks after the Munich Agreement, the government established the Refugee Institute (Ústav pro péči o uprchlíky) which collected statistical information, attempted to spatially manage refugees and advanced the integration into the labor market of those considered Czech.Footnote 30 Many refugees were distributed amongst hundreds of smaller refugee camps established in taverns, gyms, or disused factories.Footnote 31
After the shock and slow recovery from the economic crisis, unemployment was on the rise again after the Munich Agreement. Jobless refugees who were simultaneously Czechoslovak citizens therefore presented a new stress test to the Ghent system of social insurance (in which trade unions held key responsibility for unemployment benefits) introduced in the 1920s.Footnote 32 In its efforts to manage and statistically embrace the mobile population, the Institute surveyed refugees' current situations and future plans. Almost 30,000 were registered by labor exchanges as seeking work by the end of 1938 and 10,000 more half a year later.Footnote 33 In an instruction to local authorities in December 1938, the Ministry of Social and Health Care (Ministerstvo sociální a zdravotní správy) warned against the “evil resulting from idleness,” especially among young refugees. Where longer-term labor deployment wasn't feasible, district officers were to place refugees in temporary jobs.Footnote 34
Nevertheless, “idleness” seemed to prevail in the camps and the official measures clashed with refugees' own qualifications and wishes. Many of those who remained immobilized there were rank and file German social democrats who, before their escape to the interior of Czechoslovakia, had worked in industrial production. For instance, in the Litovel district (close to the Moravian city of Olomouc), most refugees were workers previously employed in textile factories. Now located in rural or small-town settings without significant industry, they struggled to find positions corresponding to their qualifications. Only a few could help clearing snow.Footnote 35 In a camp close to Kolín, a group of refugee men were dispatched to work on road construction, but complained about insufficient pay and the local population was allegedly losing its patience with refugees who were unwilling to conduct unskilled menial agricultural work. Their imagined idleness was constructed along gendered lines and was even equated to immoral behavior or prostitution.Footnote 36 In the labor camp in Místek, refugees complained about derogatory comments of local policemen, showing how placement into the labor camps also signified their social decline.Footnote 37
In lieu of regular employment opportunities, the government decided to deploy refugees in public works projects and, like in World War I, threatened exclusion from the support system in case of non-compliance. Already before that, local authorities occasionally directed refugees to aid local farmers.Footnote 38 Although this was supposed to be regular employment with all legal protections, in practice it exposed the displaced people to exploitation. The management of refugees became part of a process leading toward the more invasive regulation of labor more broadly: to quell unemployment, the government ordered the creation of labor units with an obligatory service for the unemployed and the establishment of disciplinary (labor) camps for work-shy individuals.Footnote 39 The exceptional powers of the government and the “disciplining of the unemployed,” together with the refugee “crisis,” contributed to the building of institutions and the carving out of spaces of internment that increasingly affected the Roma, who were seen as a mobile, unproductive, and criminal population.Footnote 40
Mass displacement in World War I and the late 1930s occurred in different economic contexts: whereas during the war, authorities urgently searched for labor to replace men sent to the front, after the Munich Agreement, the government tackled rising unemployment. Yet, the approach to the refugee groups and their work was strikingly similar. It resulted in a state effort to manage and mobilize refugee work, as part of wide-ranging state intervention in the economy. In both cases, however, the reality revealed limits to the government's ability to effectively control a displaced labor force and to navigate the tension between immobility and labor needs. Since these refugees were also citizens, the exploitation of their labor was considered a part of and a confirmation of their citizenship. Yet, as this article will elaborate below, this approach to work also strengthened hierarchies based on ethnicity, thereby calling into question the citizenship of those deemed idle and unwilling to work. After World War I, however, the new Czechoslovak nation-state developed a different schema for work by non-citizen refugees.
Laboratory of Future Citizenship
Russian and Ukrainian refugees enjoyed exceptional political support and became a defining example of refugee protection and support in interwar Czechoslovakia. While some refugees arrived by themselves or were stuck in Czechoslovakia at the end of World War I as prisoners of war, many were brought in by Czechoslovak officials from afar. In what became known as the Russian Aid Action (Ruská pomocná akce), in 1921, a government commission selected about 4,000 Cossacks, former White soldiers, and 1,000 students, from camps around Constantinople. The officials reported these refugees' difficult experiences of labor exploitation: some had been sent to Brazil, where they had to work on coffee plantations and were “treated as slaves,” while others had been directed to Corsica, where they labored for low wages as miners.Footnote 41
In contrast, Czechoslovakia was imagined as a place for their rehabilitation. The program was financed and administered by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with specific responsibilities taken over later by other ministries. Throughout the 1920s, the government spent considerable sums to support Russian and Ukrainian organizations and almost 30,000 refugees.Footnote 42 In addition to the political and economic interests of the Czechoslovak elites, the program manifested a strong civilizational mission invested in a future reconstruction of Russia. It imagined the refugees' stay as temporary and expressed a future-oriented approach to study and labor.
Many Cossack refugees were originally farmers and Czechoslovak officials as well as Russian refugee organizations foresaw their return to fertile agricultural regions. Managed by the semi-nongovernmental Zemědělská jednota (Agricultural Union), their farming in Czechoslovakia was also meant to “acquaint the Cossacks with modern agricultural methods.”Footnote 43 They were distributed to local farmers who volunteered for the scheme in exchange for providing food, accommodation, and a modest salary. However, the Russian workers complained about the living conditions and rations and soon some left without authorization. The reasons, however, might not have been solely material: the Cossacks mostly originated from the “privileged agricultural stratum” of pre-revolutionary Russia and resented the paternalistic approach of their Czechoslovak supporters and their subordinated position in the rural economy.Footnote 44
Education and academic life played a particularly important role for Russian and Ukrainian refugees. At the time and in later historiography, Prague was considered an “academic stronghold”Footnote 45 of the Russian emigration, or the “Russian Oxford.”Footnote 46 From the start of Russian Aid Action until 1934, the Czechoslovak government supported almost 7,000 refugee students. It provided funding for educational and research institutions, from grammar schools to a drivers' school, a pedagogy college, a Russian University, and an Institute named after the art historian Nikodim Kondakov.Footnote 47 Many young refugees also studied at Czechoslovak universities, for instance at the Medical Faculty of the Charles University or at the Czech Polytechnic (České vysoké učení technické).
In the 1930s, however, Czechoslovakia significantly curtailed this generous support due to the economic crisis, high unemployment, and the strain on public budgets. Other factors played a role too: with the stabilization of the Soviet Union, the return became improbable and distant, and, with the opening of diplomatic relations in 1935, official government support had to stop. Many educational institutions were closed: among them the Russian University's Faculty of Law, which provided instruction by first-class experts on the Russian legal system but wasn't any use for refugees during their extended stay in Czechoslovakia. With a reduced budget, however, some aid was further provided through the Czechoslovak Red Cross.
The theme of a distinct exile group focused on maintaining national identity and preparing for a reconstruction of the home country, often expressed under the label “Russia Abroad,” prevails in the existing studies. But other sources suggest a more successful social and economic integration in interwar Czechoslovakia that stood in contrast to the self-understanding of the exile group and the overarching policies of the Czechoslovak government. Although only partially examined to date, citizenship files reveal a much higher instance of interwar naturalization and integration through labor.Footnote 48 While for Russian and Ukrainian refugees, study and work was imagined as the foundation of their future, renewed citizenship in their homeland, the state in practice allowed their inclusion in the labor market. For other refugees, the denial of labor opportunities was also a sign of uncertain, or absent, citizenship. The next section focuses on ethnic hierarchies and non-recognition of refugee work as a persistent aspect of migration management in the Habsburg Empire during World War I and interwar Czechoslovakia.
The Unwanted Labor
The hierarchy of citizenship communicated through labor was already apparent in the management of refugees in Cisleithania during World War I. This system's anchoring in ethnic categorization not only affected the distribution of refugees to separate camps and communities, but also resulted in different approaches to labor recruitment. While Italian, Polish, Ruthenian, and other refugees were pressured to work on farms, Jewish camps were excluded from agricultural recruitment. Likely driven by stereotyped views of Jewish incapacity for manual work, this ban even extended to factory labor. In a telling case, the office of the Governor of Moravia refused permission to employ Jewish refugees from camps in a local textile factory in order to prevent their integration and motivate them to return to their prewar homes. Such an approach in turn strengthened the stereotypes of Jews who were said to shirk work while avoiding frontline service.Footnote 49
After World War I, many refugees couldn't be immediately “repatriated” due to the destruction caused by the war, bureaucratic obstacles of the new nation-states, or their lack of desire to return to their home communities. Especially Jews from Eastern Galicia remained stranded in the country after other groups had been repatriated. Overnight, their refugee status changed meaning: protection combining control and support gave way to pressure to leave. Campaigns, demonstrations and violence against Jewish refugees were a defining feature of the first period of Czechoslovak independence and—through exclusion—co-defined its citizenship.Footnote 50 The case of Jews remaining in the country is an example of how refugee policies could be influenced by the ethnicization of economic policies.
Postwar files of the Prague police give an indication of how this group was handled by the Czechoslovak bureaucracy. In their appeals against obligatory repatriation, refugees valorized work, emphasized their employment (for instance as clerks) or entrepreneurship (mostly as petty traders or shop owners), and submitted supportive letters from employers. In their argumentation, they adhered to a proven language that had helped especially poor migrants in the prewar empire to claim their respectability. For the Czechoslovak Ministry of Interior, however, work no longer functioned as grounds for cross-border mobility. It granted short extensions for health reasons and to finish study, yet labor activity weakened rather than strengthened the standing of these refugees in the post-war context. Not only did the pressures on the labor market due to the demobilization of soldiers play a role, but so too did distinctly negative and strongly gendered ideas about Jewish economic practices. Work of Jewish refugees was associated with black market practices and racketeering.Footnote 51 The case of Jewish migrants who moved across the phantom borders of the empire and beyond during the interwar period made visible the persistent ethnic hierarchies of migration policies. These views helped inform the approach to—mostly Jewish—foreign students as well as the categorization of forced migrants in the 1930s.
Czechoslovak universities became an attractive place for foreign students suffering exclusion in their home countries. This included Jews who couldn't study in Hungary due to the introduction of numerus clausus limiting the proportion of Jews at the country's universities.Footnote 52 In Czechoslovakia the student and other professional organizations of medical universities especially pressured the government to limit the number of foreigners and not to tolerate their employment once they had graduated.Footnote 53 To address such fears, the diplomas of foreign students stipulated that they only could practice their profession with a special labor permit, which was mostly refused to Jews, while Russian and Ukrainian alumni were allowed to work. Nevertheless, student protests continued and in November 1929 escalated into anti-semitic demonstrations at Czechoslovak universities.Footnote 54 After the Munich Agreement, these campaigns resulted in the exclusion of Jews from medical and legal professional organizations.Footnote 55
When refugees fleeing persecution in Nazi Germany began to arrive in 1933, followed by those from authoritarian Austria in 1934, Czechoslovak reactions were in some respects similar to those toward Russians and Ukrainians. In total, about 10,000 refugees from Germany were supported by private aid committees and an unknown number stayed temporarily in Czechoslovakia without ever being registered as refugees. The establishment of refugee political bodies, for instance German Social Democracy in exile (SoPaDe) in Prague or the Office of the Austrian Social Democracy Abroad (ALÖS), manifested the support of the Czechoslovak political elites to a narrow form of “political” asylum for groups that stood for the future reconstruction of Germany or Austria.Footnote 56 Both the Russian/Ukrainian and the German/Austrian exile groups organized around the political project of the future renewal of their home countries; governments of host countries coalesced around the idea of future work in their home. This similarity notwithstanding, the approach to their professional development and work couldn't have been more different. Even though the world economic crisis that hit Czechoslovakia with full force in 1930 was an important factor, the restrictive approach was driven by broader ideas about citizenship, ethnicity, and the value of work. This was especially, but not solely, true for Jewish refugees who encountered stereotyped perceptions of their ability to engage in productive work.
The influx of German speaking refugees was perceived by many—from politicians to journalists to neighbors writing denunciations—as a numeric strengthening and a renewed visibility of the disliked minority. The leftist views of many refugees further fueled critique from the political right. Moreover, Jewish refugees were often seen through the prism of the experience with World War I refugees and anti-Jewish stereotypes of criminality and improper economic dealings. As early as 1934, a report from the Prague police critically reviewed their political leanings and economic impact. Refugees were “without any doubt a passive element” supported by aid committees and “attempt in all kinds of ways, legal as well as illegal, to fit into economic life and business at the cost of the local population.” Refugees were willing to work for lower wages and many were involved in illegal trades.Footnote 57 The paradoxical connection of criticism of alleged passivity and of attempts to work demonstrated how the non-recognition of labor resulted in illegalization.
Czechoslovak refugee policies co-produced inequalities among refugees along the axis of class and social networks, as well as along that of ethnicity or “race.” In our joint book, Kateřina Čapková demonstrated the difference in approach to party leadership of the German and Austrian Social Democratic parties, next to other political groups, which allowed the elite to engage in political activity, work as political activists or as journalists, and live in relative economic stability. On the other hand, the rank and file were kept in uncertainty, couldn't work legally, and, in their dependence, often had to live in group accommodations.Footnote 58 The Austrian Schutzbund (Defense Union) fighters who escaped to Czechoslovakia after the suppressed 1934 revolt were mostly confined by their own party leadership and by Czechoslovak authorities to camps organized with almost military-style discipline.Footnote 59
As it became clear that German refugees were going to stay for an extended period of time, Czechoslovakia added a new element of control of their work. The seemingly unrelated Law on the Residence of Foreigners promulgated in 1935 required foreigners who stayed in Czechoslovakia longer than two months to apply for a residence permit that could be bound by a number of conditions.Footnote 60 In 1937, this provision was used in a plan to move refugees to poor and isolated districts in the middle of the country to restrict their political activity and work. It was also widely used to curtail other rights guaranteed to foreigners based on intergovernmental agreements. In Czechoslovakia, German citizens enjoyed considerable freedom in starting and running private enterprises, such as small businesses, which proved a helpful workaround for many of those foreigners facing restrictions on employment. Now, however, authorities often tied the residence permit to pledges from refugees to refrain from any kind of gainful activity. For instance, in Prague, refugees signed on their registration forms that “I am not allowed to be engaged in gainful activity . . . , I am not allowed to be in any employment here or run any kind of business.”Footnote 61 At the same time, most of these refugees were barred from the path to legal work through naturalization which remained difficult, long, costly, and often unsuccessful.
In 1938, after the Nazi annexation of Austria and the Munich Agreement, the negative notions of the work of Jewish refugees contributed to the strict border closure. Rumors spread about their illegal employment and protest notes argued that their “reckless practices” undermined the economy “at the cost of the state nation.”Footnote 62 The state management of refugees after the Munich Agreement made the ethnic categorization official. The Refugee Institute (Ústav pro péči o uprchlíky) established by the government designed different futures for refugees classified as Czechs and those considered Germans or Jews. While the former group was to be reintegrated, the non-Slavic ethnic groups found themselves in a figurative waiting room for emigration, their insecure Czechoslovak citizenship notwithstanding. Testifying to the ethnic hierarchy, only about 2,000 Germans and 1,800 people of “other nationality” were included among the unemployed registered by labor exchanges, a disproportionally low number.Footnote 63
The denial of work and of citizenship went hand-in-glove with the lack of material support from the state. Barring exceptional support provided to elite refugees, the aid committees depended on collections or grants from humanitarian organizations abroad, such as the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Even though it showed the successful humanitarian mobilization of a part of Czechoslovak society, the low level of support added to the material and symbolic precariousness faced by refugees. Exclusion from the labor market drew many refugees into the informal economy. Unless they could rely on the support of their families, many had to resort to “illegal” work. The police's suspicion of unauthorized work and trade practices therefore turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy. These exclusionary reflexes left Jewish refugees, especially in the second half of the 1930s and after the Munich Agreement, in a particularly precarious situation. The exclusion from work and the expectation that Jewish welfare would provide for them at a time when the state was increasingly becoming involved in social security contributed to the disruption of their citizenship, present and future.
Conclusion: The Pitfalls of Rehabilitation Through Work
The three approaches discussed above show how refugees' work impacted their status, communicated ideas about the future, and reproduced hierarchies defined by ethnicity, class, or political persuasion. Strengthened by the general lack of immigration policies in a self-declared country of emigration, the key to the Czechoslovak dealing with refugees was where and when the “laboratory and workshop” were imagined. The connection between rehabilitation and work was both past and future oriented: on the one hand, it reflected the perception of refugees' unnatural and alienated state of affairs, while on the other hand it introduced or denied pathways to future integration and citizenship. The mostly manual work of refugees in the case of war, border shifts, and endangered sovereignty was performed as a part, and also as a confirmation, of citizenship. For those seen as political refugees entering interwar Czechoslovakia, labor was a pathway to future citizenship in their original homeland, even if it was tolerated only on a temporary basis. For those marginalized due to a combination of (attributed) ethnicity and social status, the suppression of their labor and ultimately the denial of the value of their work was also a sign of their exclusion from citizenship and their lack of prospects for integration.
Ultimately, many aspects of the schemas to rehabilitate through work failed, due to the inability of governments to manage the manpower effectively or because they were designed only for reintegration into reestablished future homelands. These programs stood in stark contrast to refugees' own ideas, their temporalities and agency. However, the lack of research into refugee work based on ego documents and microhistorical sources is striking. While this article has categorized and analyzed top-down perspectives on refugee work, microhistorical sources indicate integration of refugees through work, diverging from the government plans. Close reading of petitions or (de)naturalization files and other sources can show that a decision about refugee status was not a one-step process and that labor was part of the continued negotiation of its meanings and consequences, all at a time when such a status mostly remained legally undefined. A more nuanced picture can emerge from a closer study of work from personal and family perspectives of refugees and other migrants. Their experiences and strategies, complementing and challenging the government schemas, can help replace the simplified binary distinction between immigration and emigration countries and fill the gap between studies on refugees and on labor migration.
Acknowledgments
This article was prepared as a part of the European Research Council Consolidator project Unlikely Refuge? Refugees and Citizens in East-Central Europe in the 20th Century under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No 819461).
