Transatlantic Families. The Lives of German Revolutionary Emigres, 1848/49–1914

• Applicant: Dr. Sarah Panter
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 458234267

The central research question of the proposed project focuses on how “family” shaped the agency of German revolutionary emigres during the transatlantic migration in the “long” nineteenth century. In doing so, it moves beyond the dominant interpretations in regard to their lives after 1848/49 in three ways: First, it conceptualizes their transnational lives as biographies of migration; in other words, it explains the actors’ self-understanding and agency via experiences of transatlantic mobility. In so doing, the project connects explicitly to the interdisciplinary research field of mobility studies. Second, it analyzes the social, economic, and cultural foundations of the process of mobility. In this context, it emphasizes the central importance of family networks for shaping the actors’ agency and thereby transcends established post-revolutionary turning points, such as the American Civil War or the foundation of the German Empire in 1871. Third, the project takes not only the wives, but also their children into account systematically: On the one hand, this opens up an enhanced perspective on the history of the influence the revolution had over a longer period of time. On the other hand, it explains its transatlantic legacies beyond the categories of flight, exile, or return. Altogether, such an analysis of the transatlantic lives of German revolutionary emigres highlights that mobility, family, and political self-understanding were highly entangled and are thus only understandable in their interplay. Finally, by a nuanced analysis of multiple belongings, border-crossing capabilities of mobility, as well as revolutionary self-stagings the project also aims to shed new light on how the (auto-)biographical practice of “Forty-Eighters” helped them to construct a common basis for their belonging to this group and how this changed during the process of transatlantic migration.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants