Holland goers

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"Hollandgänger" or "Pickmäijer" in Uelsen , sculpture by Leo Janischowsky and his partner (1997)

Holland goers were migrant workers who, after the Thirty Years' War , from around 1650 to 1914 - driven by social hardship - moved seasonally from economically weak areas of Germany to the Netherlands (colloquially: Holland ) in order to work there and an urgently needed income for themselves and theirs To achieve families. Migrant workers who moved to West or East Frisia were also referred to as "Frieslandgoers".

The Hollandgang was a form of seasonal labor migration and is now seen as part of the much larger and more extensive North Sea system . In certain regions of Westphalia and bordering parts of the country, the trade in the dead developed from the Holland gang .

Procedure of the Holland walk

The people who went to Holland typically set out on foot from their homeland in spring in a joint hike and regularly used fixed routes that led to central meeting points. Migrant workers in Holland were mainly employed as day laborers in agriculture, often as grass mowers or peat cutters . Peat cutting was considered the hardest work, but it was also paid the highest. Other Holland-goers worked as seamen, in the brick industry, in the genever production , as ceiling peddlers , herring and whalers . As a rule, younger men, and more rarely women, worked as maids or in bleaching shops . In the late 19th century and into the 20s of the 20th century, going to Holland was often the only way for many young women from the industrial areas of the Ruhr to contribute to the family's livelihood due to the lack of other employment alternatives.

The unmarried young men - as can be seen from the Dutch church registers - often stayed in Holland permanently and founded families there. The Dutch movement reached its highest intensity in the second half of the 18th century. The number of people going to Holland is not exactly documented, but between 1700 and 1875 it is estimated at 20,000 to 40,000 per year.

Causes of the Holland walk

The Holland goers came mainly from the regions of Westphalia, which are characterized by great backwardness and poverty (especially Lipperland , Münsterland ), from the Emsland , from the Tecklenburger Land , the Osnabrück / Mindener area, the Oldenburg and from the Lower Weser area . Less fertile geest, moor and heathland landscapes yielded only low yields in these areas; the rural population was plagued by oppressive taxes and duties. Squeezed into traditional rural structures, there was also hardly any new full-time farming job with relatively high population growth. As a result, there was an increasing number of resident smallholders ( Kötner , also called Kötter or Kätner), but above all of land-poor small- scale owners ( Brinkitzer or Brinkkötter, also called cultivators ). A rapidly growing, non-attached landless stratum of heuerlings , houselands (also referred to as resident or tenant), who did not belong to the actual village community, developed further .

These hirelings, houselands and brinksitzers made up the main stream of Holland-goers, which was often supplemented by (indebted) Kötner, by sons of small farmers who were not entitled to inheritance and even by full farmers. The prevailing inheritance law did not allow a division of the farms. The ownership passed to the firstborn son, other male descendants were settled. Only a few peasants, insofar as they were in economic need, joined the migrant workers. Members of the older generation only did migrant work in times of acute economic crisis. For the same reasons that gave rise to the Hollandgang, emigration to America developed in the 19th century.

See also

literature

in order of appearance

  • Johannes Tack: The Holland goers in Hanover and Oldenburg. A contribution to the history of the workers' migration . Leipzig 1902.
  • Gerda van Asselt: De Hollandgänger: gastarbeid in de 19de eeuw . In: Tijdschrift voor sociale geschiedenis , Vol. 2 (1976), pp. 4–41 (Dutch).
  • Andreas Eiynck : Freren and going to Holland . In: Bernhard Fritze (Ed.): Freren. Small town in the Emsland . Van Acken publishing house, Lingen 1994.
  • Horst Rössler: Hollanders, convicts and migrants. Bremen and Bremerhaven as migration areas . Edition Temmen, Bremen 2000, ISBN 3-86108-765-0 .
  • Gerda van Asselt, Albin Gladen a. a. (Ed.): Hollandgang in the mirror of the travel reports of evangelical clergy. Sources on seasonal labor migration in the second half of the 19th century . 2 volumes. Aschendorff, Münster 2007, ISBN 978-3-402-06800-7 .
  • Ralf Weber: "... where they have to undergo slave labor for meager wages." Going to Holland from the Oldenburger Münsterland in the 19th century . In: Heimatbund für das Oldenburger Münsterland (ed.): Yearbook for the Oldenburger Münsterland 2014 , Vechta 2013, pp. 68–86.
  • Marijn Molema, Meindest Schroor (Hrsg.): Migration history in north-west Germany and the northern Netherlands. Sources, handouts and examples for cross-border research ( Benelux-German Borderlands Histories , Volume 1). Münster 2019, ISBN 978-3-8405-2001-3

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ F.-J Brüggemeier: Life on site . Beck, Munich 1983, ISBN 3-406-09742-1 , pp. 73, 168.