While lots of research on racism in postwar West Germany notes the persistence of racist attitudes in the general population and among political and governmental elites, there has not been much work with material that demonstrates how state officials conceptualised of their own exclusionary thinking explicitly in terms of race, and how to obscure the racist nature of their own policies.
Dr Nicholas Courtman, Alfred Landecker Lecturer in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures
06 February 2025
New research reveals racism in citizenship law in post-war West Germany
A new book chapter by Dr Nicholas Courtman, Alfred Landecker Lecturer in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, investigates previously undiscovered examples of racial discrimination in West German citizenship law after World War II.
‘Race and Racism in the Citizenship Law and Naturalization Practice of Early West Germany’ explores how multiple state authorities discriminated on racial grounds when processing applications for naturalisation in the 1950s and 1960s. The chapter does not focus on the treatment of Jews or of Sinti and Roma, focusing instead on other ways West Germany still acted as a racial state.
Dr Courtman’s research shows that the highest-ranking legal experts, federal judges and ministerial officials in West Germany understood racism to be a permissible aspect of state policy with regard to citizenship law – and perhaps even viewed it as necessary to protect the ‘racial character’ of the German people and state.
This was happening despite the country’s constitutional ban on racial discrimination with regard to issues of naturalisation (the process of making someone a legal citizen of a country they were not born in).
The findings contradict perceptions of West German leadership as having learnt lessons on racism in the wake of Nazism. Instead, the research shows that governmental and scholarly elites continued to believe that race had a significant role to play in determining who could become a member of the German people or the German state.
Through examining previously unused sources, Dr Courtman uncovers examples of how authorities tried to conceal how they ‘accounted for race’ in citizenship law and naturalisation. One way they did this was by formulating residency and naturalisation law to allow for racially selective and exclusionary administrative practices on the part of the state, while obscuring the relevance of race for those decisions.
The chapter features in Reimagining Citizenship in Postwar Europe, which exposes how citizenship was re-considered after World War II.
Read the chapter to learn more.
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Alfred Landecker Lecturer