Strangers in Austria. Biographies of working migrants

About 16% of the Austrian population were born outside the Austrian borders, about 8% have not got the Austrian nationality. Austria is therefore an immigration country. The research work in question deals with to the so-called "guest workers", working migrants who have come to Austria mainly from former Yugoslavia or Turkey since the early sixties. Taking into consideration the latest developments of the social sciences the view is focused on a relatively small part of society: The History of the working migrants has to be seen as micro-History, always related to the macro-History, i. e. the Austrian contemporary History or more precisely the economic and social History. Migrants do not form a homogeneous social group. In the reception country notice is taken of them not until after their migration - even by the scholars. Complex biographical and historical contexts and backgrounds are widely neglected. Some phases and aspects of the migration process use to be analysed, e.g. the motivation for or the course of migration, but the biography as a whole and all its connections with society are almost never taken into account. This research work, on the contrary, aims - in reconstructing biographies - at showing how the migration influences the whole biography and vice versa - how the biographical and sociohistorical facts gain relevance for the migration process. Issues: The first generation - Migration as an experience of discontinuity The second and third generation - Lives with no identity The generations - family knowledge and family secrets This research work is indebted to the principles of the interpretative social sciences: h does not start by constructing a set of hypotheses, but the hypotheses are generated during the process of field research based on its latest results. Biographical, narrative interviews (following Fritz Schütze) are used in order to collect data. The texts of the interviews are interpreted according to the "objective hermeneutics" of Ulrich Oevermann in the adaptation of Gabriele Rosenthal. Family interviews, family sculptures and genograms should throw light on the generation aspect.

In Austria`s public discussion, foreigners appear more or less only as objects who are argued on: by the numerous xenophobes as well as by the defenders of the human rights and of immigrants. There are always the "natives" discussing the "aliens". The migrants themselves, thus the migrants as subjects, remain without a voice in the Austrian society. To listen at least once to them was one of the aims of this research project: working migrants and their children belonging to six families (three of them coming from Turkey, another three from Serbia) were asked to tell their life stories; the involved - by the way exclusively female - scientists had the task to explore the interviews to the extent that they could find out what these interviews do not tell, anything unconscious, repressed, secret. Six families, this may seem poor - nevertheless it is a number a project like this has hardly the capacity to cope with. The reason is that the evaluation following the chosen method of objective hermeneutics (the only one able to guarantee a serious interpretation of biographical interviews) takes an incredible effort: sentence for sentence, word for word, "eh" for "eh", stop for stop, sigh for sigh, the scientists of the interpreting team analysed in detail which meanings might be hidden under the surface of the texts, until they finally were able to give some evidence (or at least plausible hints) for one or the other version. This team consisted of a social scientist, a psychotherapist and experts for the civilization of the migrants` countries of origin. The results give a clear idea of what was speculated on until now: the enormous breaks in the biographies of the immigrating generation as a result of their coming to a foreign country, the loss of certainties, of social embedding and often also of status in some cases; a hard-to-bear time trip going along with the migration: together with the change of place, several migrants have to handle a leap of about 150 to 200 years of emotional and social transformation; and, finally, the quite different ways of overcoming these experiences - from a persistent feeling of being foreign (accompanied by a multitude of psychic problems) to a successful identification with Austria as a new home country. Or, as far as the second generation is concerned: a life in continuous tension between the way the young people see themselves, i.e. as Austrians, and the contrary wishes of their parents as well as the attitude of the Austrian society towards them vacillating between latent exclusion and open racism. Thus the foreigners` life stories tell also very much about Austria: Those youngsters belonging to the second generation, for example, whose identification with Austria is especially strong, display often decidedly racist ideas which they obviously consider as a ticket of admission to the Austrian society. Therefore, we may draw the conclusion that this society is seen as a strikingly racist one by those who are excluded.