Luciano Trincia (ed.),
DOSSIER: ITALIAN MIGRATION IN GERMANY BETWEEN THE XIX AND XX CENTURY:
SOURCES, ASPECTS AND METHODOLOGICAL CHALLENGES

The essays in this issue are meant to stimulate new research in applying the global criteria to the study of the history of early migration of Italians to Germany between XIX and XX century. Ercole Sori offers a broad analysis of the root causes of Italian emigration to central Europe, not only along the "space axis" in measuring and characterizing the phenomenon, but also along the "time axis" (the "long-term territorial restlessness" of the Italian population, throughout the slow and difficult modernisation process). The Author examines the social stratification and segmentation of the job market, and the role of immigrants in the productive and economic structures of the host countries. Christoph Cornellissen, for his part, introduces us to historiography with the comparative approach, perhaps the most creative and promising form of investigative history, which includes three levels (the subjects, the element and the level of analysis). Cornellissen chooses the third paradigm, overcoming, in this global perspective, the widespread provincialism of earlier studies on the issue. In this sense, the adoption of a global perspective and of the comparative approach allow the Author to introduce broader categories and to see Italian migration in Germany in a wider European and international context.
In his French language essay, Hans-Walter Hermann, who represents the Federal Republic of Germany within the "Consiglio Archivistico Internazionale" (International Archivist Council), offers an outline of the German sources on this issue, starting from the archives in Bavaria, Renania and Saarland. Hermann's article is not actually exhaustive in itself, however it reveals interesting possibilities for future research and gives useful hints on the German administrative system to facilitate future studies in this field.
By observing Italians and Poles, the two major immigrant groups in Germany under the Bismarck-William period, René Del Fabbro, in his article, describes the foreigners’ legal situation and analyses the attempts to establish a homogeneous legislation affecting immigrant workers under the Empire at the beginning of the XX century. The Author compares the differing interests between Prussia and the Confederate States of southern Germany, and the conflicts among the big agrarian and industrial capitalists, with those currently experienced by the European Union, with comparable problems of harmonisation and socio-political integration. In recent years, influenced by social history, the gender component of Italian migration has drawn an increasing interest. An effort to write a gendered history of Italian emigration in Germany among the XIX and XX century is still on the drawing board; for this reason, the essay by Casimira Grandi is certainly significant. She studies the entrance of Italian women in the European job market, dealing, for the first time, with "one of the big unresolved questions in the social mobility of our past".
Finally, Claudio Visentin’s essay offers a fresh picture of the "proletarian" emigration toward central Europe, as seen by late XIX and early XX century bourgeois travellers who, for reasons of study or professional interests, happened to trek through the area.
For Italian intellectuals and professionals, throughout the modern era, the "German trip" had represented an occasion for advancement. Under Bismarck, the new Germany rapidly became for them an increasingly attractive "laboratory of modernization", where the social and demographic dynamics of the huge industrialising process could be observed.

Luconi Stefano, GENEROSO POPE AND ITALIAN-AMERICAN VOTERS IN NEW YORK CITY

The owner of a chain of Italian-language newspapers, Generoso Pope stands out as the epitome of the Italian-American ethnic political broker in traditional scholarship. This essay checks the political stand of Pope’s mouthpiece with the largest circulation, the New York City-based «Il Progresso Italo-Americano», against the results of selected mayoral and federal elections in the local Italian-American community between the late 1920s and the mid 1940s. As most voters of Italian ancestry hardly cast their ballots for the candidates that «Il Progresso Italo-Americano» supported, this essay concludes that Pope usually failed to exert a significant influence on the Italian-American vote.

Saccon Roberta, The model of integration of Italian descendants in Santa Catarina, Vale do rio Itajaí-Açu, Brasil

Based on a survey conducted in the State of Santa Catarina (Brazil) between 1998 and 1999, this article offers a sociological analysis of the process of integration of the children of Italian migrants in Brazil at the end of the XIX century, in the Itajaí-Açu river valley.
The Author refers to both the historical and the contemporary process of integration. The key-concept of interpretation is based on a distinction between public and private domain. In the private domain, there is multi-culture and mono-culture; in the public domain, there is equal or unequal access to opportunities. From the meeting of these variables, a fourfold typology arises: integration, assimilation, separation, and marginalisation.
In the past, people of Italian descent faced several historical periods characterised by unequal access to public opportunities, as at the beginning of colonisation, or by the attempt to impose a single culture in the private sphere, as in the age of nationalisation.
Currently, the trend to incorporate Italian descendants at the social level is quite difficult to define. The complexity of Brazilian society, and its racial and cultural diversity, give origin to a variety of social integrations depending on such variables as social class, but also rural or urban setting, and the degree of hybridisation within the communities.