Migration sichtbar und erzählbar machen

Zeithistorische Migrationsforschung in einer Tiroler Kleinstadt

Abstract

Hall in Tyrol is a small town in a rural environment close to Innsbruck and hosts an important industrial zone. This is why Hall has attracted many ‘guest workers’, mainly from Turkey and Yugoslavia, since the 1960s. The town is proud of its history, but there only exists a selective historical awareness of migration history: Although migration to Hall has a long historical tradition due to rock salt mining, salt refining, trade and marketplace, it is not visible
in the town’s history. Especially the migration history of the second half of the 20th century remains unnoticed in the official remembrance while being ubiquitous in the everyday life in Hall. The BMWFW/Sparkling Science-project Seeking Traces: Hall in Motion attempts to fill in this gap in the history of migration to Hall. The results of this project constitute the core of this paper. Multiple perspectives inform this history: Since the archive of the town is unable to provide the sources needed, the personal collections of employers and private persons and the oral historical narrations form the basis for the telling of the town’s history with migrants as protagonists and stakeholders. The paper starts with the specific invisibility of migration history in a small Tyrolean town and continues to discuss the sources the present is able to offer.