In 1988, Maciej Scholz submitted his diploma thesis at Vienna University of Economics and Business for which he had conducted a survey amongst Poles living in Austria who had been granted refugee status. One of his almost two hundred questions concerned the language skills the Poles had acquired since their arrival. Scholz was baffled when twelve of his one hundred respondents declared that they had picked up some basics in Serbo-Croatian. Asking about the reasons he was told by his respondents that they had found employment in manual jobs in which they often worked together with labour migrants from Yugoslaviai.
Scholz’ fascinating paper – which represents to my knowledge the only survey conducted amongst the tens of thousands of Poles who came to Austria in the 1980s – reminds us that migration movements from different parts of the world rarely take place in isolation. When I looked for sources for my dissertation about the transit of Poles via Austria to Canada in the 1980s, I frequently came across documents mentioning (directly or indirectly) the relationship between the Poles and other migrants in Austria. In addition to asylum seekers from other Soviet Bloc countries, most mentionings concern labour migrants from Yugoslavia (the so-called “Gastarbeiter“). Yugoslavs were by far the largest group of foreigners residing in Austria in the 1980s. That alone, however, does not explain the frequent contacts between them and the Poles.
The vast majority of Poles who came to Austria in increasing numbers from the late 1970s onwards did not intend to the remain in the country. After a while, most of them continued their journey to countries like the United States, Canada and Australia. A few, however, were rejected by the embassies of these countries and were forced to remain in Austria. This is corroborated by Scholz’ survey, in which two thirds of the respondents claimed that they had originally not intended to stayii. The Poles remaining behind most often settled eventually in Vienna. This cannot only be explained by the economic or cultural attractiveness of Austria’s capital city but also by its function as a major transit hub. Polish asylum seekers who applied for admission to overseas countries had to come to Vienna in order to register with one of the many voluntary agencies as well as for the immigration interview and the medical examination at the embassy of their country of destination. After their rejection, most Poles simply remained in Vienna or the surrounding areas, because they did not really have an incentive to move to another part of Austria.
By contrast, most Yugoslavs came to Austria officially as labour migrants. The Austrian authorities went to great lengths in order to keep Yugoslavs out of the asylum system during the Cold War, because state-socialist Yugoslavia did not belong to the Soviet Bloc and had insteadbecome an important partner of Austria. The co-operation between the two countries led to the conclusion of a labour recruitment agreement in 1966. Over the following years, Vienna attracted large numbers of Yugoslav labour migrants with its many factories, construction sites and public institutions (like hospitals). As a consequence, more than 66 thousand Yugoslav citizens were officially registered in Vienna in 1988 (in addition to 13 thousand Poles)iii.
But even the concentration of two immigrant groups in the same city does not automatically generate frequent encounters. The explanation lies rather in the overlapping of their social spaces. Yugoslavs and Poles often found themselves in the same position in the social hierarchies of Vienna despite their different backgrounds. While most Yugoslavs had little formal education and hailed from rural areasiv, the Poles coming to Austria in the 1980s were often young, highly skilled or educated and originated from urban centresv. Nevertheless, most Poles encountered major obstacles in finding employment corresponding to their skills. In addition to their lacking or insufficient command of German, their qualifications were usually not recognised. Thus, some had to work in manual jobs as unskilled labourers despite their high level of educationvi. And in that very segment of Vienna’s labour market the Poles came in touch with Yugoslavs.
What were the results of those encounters at work? Next to the acquisition of some basics in Serbo-Croatian facilitated by a shared Slavic core vocabulary, the encounters seemed to have brought about a few marriages between Poles and Yugoslavs. In the first nine months of 1981, the Polish embassy in Vienna was informed about five marriages between Polish women and Yugoslav men in Austria. (Interestingly, no marriage between a Yugoslav woman and a Polish man was registered). This number is small in comparison with the 217 Poles (of whom 190 were women) who married Austrian citizens during the same time periodvii. However, we have to keep in mind that foreign women could acquire Austrian citizenship until 1983 by getting married to an Austrian man. That legal incentive might have increased the number of Polish-Austrian marriages. Furthermore, the number of Poles staying behind in Austria had only started to rise. We may assume that the number of Polish-Yugoslav marriages was higher in the following years.
But did the encounters between Poles and Yugoslavs also lead to tensions and conflict? This is likely, but sources that give us insight into this are hard to come by. On the one hand, police files from the 1990s held at Vienna’s City Archive suggest that both groups indirectly competed over the limited number of residence permits. For example, in one case, the prolongation of a residence permit of a Polish woman who was married to an Austrian was (at first) turned down by the city of Vienna in 1994 with the justification that Vienna already had one of the highest shares of foreigners in the country (amongst which citizens from former Yugoslavia and Turkey were explicitly mentioned)viii. On the other hand, children born to Yugoslav (and Turkish) labour migrants in Austria had allegedly trouble finding employment, because they had to compete with immigrants from countries in Central and Eastern Europe (like Poland) who started arriving in even greater numbers after the end of state socialismix.
I am fairly sure that there is more evidence out there that would allow us to reconstruct in greater detail the contacts between Poles and Yugoslavs in Vienna from the 1970s onwards. In addition to written material, oral history interviews might be useful to find out how both sides remember and interpret their encounters. Such research could be helpful in order to understand the emergence of Vienna’s migrant working-class over the last fifty years. Due to the social advancement of native Austrians as well as restrictions on the acquisition of Austrian citizenship, 79 per cent of all workers in Vienna nowadays are either foreigners or fulfil the criteria of the so-called ‘migration background’ (both parents were born abroad)x.
This migrant working-class consists, of course, not just of people from Poland and (former) Yugoslavia. It is striking, however, that my sources do not mention any encounters between Poles and labour migrants from Turkey, despite the fact that the latter made up the second largest group of foreigners in Vienna in the 1980s. Did religion and culture constitute a barrier between the two groups? A survey amongst school children of Polish descent from the 2000s indicates that they quite often agreed to the statement that the immigration from Turkey to Vienna constituted a third Ottoman siegexi. Were anti-Muslim stereotypes already widespread in the 1980s or was it something the Poles adopted only later in order to gain acceptance in Austrian society? I personally tend to the latter explanation, but that’s a story for another day.
Thumbnail picture: Vienna's Südbahnhof in 1956, WStLA, Fotos des Presse- und Informationsdienstes, FC1: 56380/5; MA 8 - Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv; Presse- und Informationsdienst; CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
i Scholz, Maciej: Flüchtlingswanderung aus Polen nach Österreich in den achtziger Jahren. Ökonomische und soziale Integration polnischer Flüchtlinge in Österreich. Diploma Thesis at Vienna University of Economics and Business 1988, pp. 74-76.
ii Scholz 1988, pp. 61-62.
iii Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Wien 1989, p. 46.
iv Kapetanović, Mišo: Yugoslav Labor Migrants Emerging as the Austrian Working Class (1960-1980), zeitgeschichte 49 (2022) 1, pp. 87-110, p. 88.
v Scholz 1988, pp. 48-49, 52-53 and 58-59; Czakon-Tralski, Dorota: Emigranci czy współczesni nomadzi? Socjologiczny obraz Polaków w Austrii, Kraków 2018, pp. 248-250.
vi Scholz 1988, pp. 86-87.
vii Archiwum Ministerstwa Spraw Zewnętrznych: Austria, Numer zespołu: 45-84, Teczka: Austria 1981 (A.023), Sprawozdanie z pracy Ambasady PRL w Wiedniu za rok 1981, p. 28.
viii Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv: Bundespolizeidirektion Wien, Sicherheitsverwaltung, Fremdenpolizei, Aufenthaltsangelegenheiten, 2.5.1.5.A8/22, Fall IV-796.254, Bescheid vom 07.02.1994, p. 2.
ix Grösel, Lisa: Fremde von Staats Wegen. 50 Jahre „Fremdenpolitik“ in Österreich. Wien 2016, p. 95.
x Stögner, Diana; Kowall, Nikolaus: Wahlrecht und soziale Schicht: Wie die Position auf dem Arbeitsmarkt über das Wahlrecht entscheidet, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft 49 (2024) 4, pp. 49-64, p. 59.
xi Hintermann, Christiane: Dissonante Geschichtsbilder? Empirische Untersuchung zu Geschichtsbewusstsein und Identitätskonstruktion von Jugendlichen mit Migrationshintergrund in Wien. Demokratiezentrum Wien 2007, pp. 123-124.
