**Susanne Lachenicht**

Chair of Early Modern History, Universitaet Bayreuth, 95440 Bayreuth, Germany; susanne.lachenicht@uni-bayreuth.de

Received: 5 March 2018; Accepted: 10 April 2018; Published: 13 April 2018

"During the last decade it has become more than clear to historians working in the field of migration that this phenomenon has to be regarded as a normal and structural element of human societies throughout history." (Lucassen and Lucassen 2005, p. 9)

### **1. Introduction**

In 2015, more than 890,000 people arrived in the Federal Republic of Germany, seeking refuge and asylum. In the same year, another 846,000 EU citizens moved to Germany as well. Almost 600,000 people (non-German citizens) left the country within the same year.<sup>2</sup> However, media coverage mainly dealt with the group of refugees and asylum seekers—people mostly fleeing from theatres of war in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Debates among Germans—pro and contra asylum—were concerned with a number of issues (and the list is not exhaustive): integration and assimilation, Islam and the Islamic State, terror, cultural difference, crime (sexual abuse in particular), reasons behind flight and migration, jobs and housing markets, escape conditions and death in the Mediterranean.

Discourse on flight and migration was by no means random. Expectations, prejudice and fears as much as aid built on past experiences (or, more precisely, on narratives of past experiences)—more recent and less recent ones. Germans, the media and politicians in particular, turned to history (and at times also to historians) in order to understand two things: (1) next to political, religious and economic aspects they became interested in historical reasons behind flight and mass migrations in the second decade of the twenty-first century; (2) they inquired into historical examples of migration, integration and/or assimilation. People from a great variety of social strata and with different educational backgrounds turned to 'the past' in order to understand the present.

However, can we understand present migrations through their historical 'making'? Can we compare present migrations with other, past migrations? And what can we learn from this?
