Being a foreigner in Austria. Biographies of working migrants

Austrian Science Fund

To listen at least once to the "foreigners" in Austria was one of the aims of this research project: working migrants and their children belonging to six families (three of them coming from Turkey, another three from Serbia) were asked to tell their life stories.
The interpretation followed the method of objective hermeneutics. The team consisted of a social scientist, a psychotherapist and experts for the civilization of the migrants’ countries of origin.

The results give a clear idea of what was speculated on until now: the enormous breaks in the biographies of the immigrating generation as a result of their coming to a foreign country, the loss of certainties, of social embedding and often also of status in some cases; a hard-to-bear time trip going along with the migration: together with the change of place, several migrants have to handle a leap of about 150 to 200 years of emotional and social transformation; and, finally, the quite different ways of overcoming these experiences – from a persistent feeling of being foreign (accompanied by a multitude of psychic problems) to a successful identification with Austria as a new home country. Or, as far as the second generation is concerned: a life in continuous tension between the way the young people see themselves, i.e. as Austrians, and the contrary wishes of their parents as well as the attitude of the Austrian society towards them vacillating between latent exclusion and open racism.

Thus the foreigners’ life stories tell also very much about Austria: Those youngsters belonging to the second generation, for example, whose identification with Austria is especially strong, display often decidedly racist ideas which they obviously consider as a ticket of admission to the Austrian society. Therefore, we may draw the conclusion that this society is seen as a strikingly racist one by those who are excluded.