This much-anticipated monograph investigates the political culture in the Federal Republic of Germany surrounding the “foreign family”: the trailing spouses, children, and relatives involved in care work in the home, who migrated alongside or following so-called “guest workers.” As Lauren Stokes persuasively argues, these “family migrants” and what Germans took to be the distinctively foreign family structures and values that encouraged family reunification in the Federal Republic exercised an outsized hold on the minds of Germans across areas of responsibility and levels of government. For the West German state, it was, as Chancellor Helmut Schmidt put it in 1978, not the “free movement of labor but . . .free movement of the families of labor” (2) that was to be feared. Across seven chapters spanning the 1950s to the 1990s, with a center of gravity in the 1970s, Stokes details how the idea of the foreign family emerged and became an object of fear, justifying extraordinary measures to limit its influence and presence in West Germany even as the courts granted rights to family reunification after the end of labor recruitment in 1973. Thematic chapters touch on different categories of family migrants which the state sought to regulate, ranging from dependent children and men as family migrants to marriage migration or children moving back to Germany after their families had decided to return to Turkey in the 1980s.
Chapters are loosely chronological, beginning with the initial embrace of family migration in the early years of labor recruitment as a “solution rather than a problem” (25), with the German bureaucracy welcoming such migration because foreigners’ “excessive family sense” (20) would encourage them to keep to themselves, avoiding undesired integration. This idea of the family as a self-contained repository of foreign values became a problem for the German state after 1973, and Stokes details how concerns about foreign families encouraged “settlement bans” preventing foreigners from moving to “overburdened” neighborhoods. These bans, which lasted longest in West Berlin, demonstrate for Stokes that, contrary to common assumption, the lessons of the Nazi past often worked to limit rights for foreign citizens because policymakers feared a far-right backlash to too large or visible a migrant population.
Chapters on child migration and men as family migrants show how attempts to restrict family reunification encouraged a view that the foreign family was illegitimate, neither capable of making decisions about its own welfare nor held together by genuine emotional bonds. Foreign families, German bureaucrats and sympathetic social scientists claimed, were simultaneously irrational and overly economically motivated, with higher child benefits or access to the labor market, rather than a desire to settle permanently as a family unit in West Germany, spurring family reunification. This view of the foreign family led to seemingly paradoxical positions, agitating against issuing work permits on the grounds that they discouraged integration by encouraging further family migration. Many even argued against reuniting children with parents in the interests of child welfare since too large a foreign population could not be integrated, ultimately harming the prospective migrant more than separation from the family would. Such state paternalism manifested in policies on marriages between German women and foreign men and marriage migration within foreign families, with the foreign family understood as an oppressive, patriarchal institution from which German and foreign women alike needed protection.
While the main actors in Fear of the Family are state bureaucrats, Stokes never loses sight of the implications of their actions, as their fear of the family in turn became fear within the family, creating insecurity surrounding access to the labor market, housing, education, childcare, and secure legal status. The book culminates in a chapter on citizenship reform in the 1990s, tracing how decades of rhetoric shaped laws that cleared a path to citizenship for a second generation, presumed to be alienated from foreign parents, but not for those parents themselves. Even as access to citizenship became more open, the fear of the family cast a long shadow.
Fear of the Family demonstrates the centrality of family migration to the “guest worker” program and its afterlives. Stokes notes that “the history of labor migration has aways simultaneously been the history of the family” (5), with the “guest worker” model requiring productive labor of migrants whose mobility was, in turn, predicated on immobility outside the welfare state of those carrying out the reproductive labor of parenting, education, or healthcare. Labor and family migration were intertwined, a fact migrants recognized and officials sought to deny. Stokes shows how the same logic of neoliberal governance that informed the “guest worker” program structured family migration. Migrants deemed capable of contributing economically or offloading responsibility for social reproduction from the welfare state were granted visas and residence permits. Others have presented the economic rationale of the “guest worker” program in tension with the humanitarian ethic of the right to family reunification, but Stokes argues for a fundamental consistency, returning capitalism to its former place at the center of “guest worker” history. In contrast to those earlier Marxian studies of labor migration, Stokes has much to say about the interrelationship between capitalism and race and gender. Racialized notions about foreigners or about gender roles within families shaped assessment of the “market conformity” of family migrants. Citizenship and belonging were structured by the ideology of market conformity, which itself was shot through with gendered and racializing ideas. Intriguingly, Stokes argues that such techniques of neoliberal governance were tested on migrants before being applied more broadly. The booming field of postwar German migration history has often remained rather siloed, but Stokes convincingly demonstrates the utility of the lens migration offers to critical questions in the history of the Federal Republic.
The book should become a touchstone for historians of migration and modern Germany. A short review cannot capture all its strengths, especially its remarkable breadth of sources. Especially praiseworthy is the considered use of contemporaneous social science. Stokes mines these studies without losing sight of how beholden they were to the concerns animating the fear of the family. A further strength is the book's careful attention to processes of policy formation, tracking revisions in proposed regulations and negotiation between ministries and governments at all levels. Strikingly, this focus reveals that fear of the foreign family was not the province of one party. The conservative Kohl government built upon policies and discourses inherited from the previous social-liberal coalition. Differences between ministries were often more substantive than those between parties.
A relatively underexplored theme in the book is the role of the courts, which for Stokes are not the consistent defenders of migrant rights others have presumed them to be. Nevertheless, there are many instances in the book of policymakers shoring up regulations preemptively against legal challenges; more study is needed of this dynamic, even recursive interaction between the courts and bureaucratic power. Nonetheless, Lauren Stokes has produced a masterful work of critical history, one that remains all too timely. This review was written in the wake of attacks on emergency personnel in Berlin during New Year's Eve 2022 celebrations, which were blamed by Friedrich Merz, head of the CDU, on the deficient socialization of young men he described as “little pashas” raised in permissive, patriarchal foreign families. Fear of the family is alive and well, just as critical to understanding the German present as the recent past.
